A silly, featherweight confection that will only appeal to the authors’ many fans.
A mother and daughter team up for another volume of anecdotal stories.
There are countless readers for whom a book is akin to a truffle, a small, sweet, delicate treat lacking in anything particularly sustaining. Often, it’s as much about having others know you’re enjoying it as it is about actually enjoying it. Here, bestselling novelist Scottoline and her daughter Serritella (Have a Nice Guilt Trip, 2014, etc.), both Sunday columnists for the Philadelphia Inquirer, deliver another truffle of a book. It is about nothing but enjoyment, a nudge-nudge, wink-wink narrative about womanhood in all of its messy, wonderful glory (well, “all” from the viewpoint of two well-to-do white women). It is the sixth such book from this mother-and-daughter team, ostensibly in the tradition of humorists like Erma Bombeck. Scottoline and Serritella have yet to reach Bombeck’s level of popularity, but it isn’t for lack of effort—or perhaps it is: many of the sentences (even paragraphs) consist of only a few words: “We get it.” “We rock!” “Like Mensa.” One essay notes that, in disagreements with the power company, they always win: “Because they have the power.” Elsewhere, “I have a gangrene thumb” describes a comical difficulty with planting “a zillion” perennials. Other examples: “She’s like Oprah if Oprah could twerk.” “Woot woot!” “LOL.” “I’m in love. / With my Fitbit. / I’m smitten, which makes me Smitbit. / Or maybe Fitbitten. / Either way, I’m into it….By the way, my dogs do not have Fitbits. / They don’t Fitbite.” The topics are mostly the same as in their previous books, many similar to those Bombeck covered far more dynamically in her many bestsellers. There’s another, more relevant, definition of a truffle: “a strong-smelling underground fungus that resembles an irregular, rough-skinned potato.”
A silly, featherweight confection that will only appeal to the authors’ many fans.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05994-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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