A moving, honest, and laughter-filled account of eight women who gather one weekend every year and enjoy themselves to the...
Loyalty and friendship among eight women.
In 1993, Link (Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, 2013) was “a thirty-one-year old wife and mother of two, a bar waitress with a college degree” who was about to engage in “the most radical act [she’d] committed in years.” She was headed to Drummond Island in Lake Huron with three other women, her fellow co-workers, for a three-day wild weekend. They planned to stay up late and eat and drink whatever they wanted. For three days, they had no responsibilities except to each other and to “just keep going.” From that auspicious weekend, the Drummond Girls were born, and they vowed to return each year together unless they were pregnant or dead. When four more friends were added to the mix, the final group was set, and this troupe of women faithfully returned to Drummond Island each year. With humor, honesty, and a deep love for each individual, Link describes the slow but steady buildup of friendship and loyalty among the members as they ate, drank, played pool at the local bars, wandered in the dead of night through the thick woods to find bears, and generally bonded in ways that many women may never experience in their lifetimes. She discusses the troubles with spouses who didn’t understand the need for these trips and the ups and downs of each woman’s life off the island, which only underlines how free these women feel each time they gather. Link ably portrays her initial sense of isolation and need for friendship, providing descriptions of the wilderness she has found on the island and her increasing allegiance to these women as they all gradually grow older and experience life events that change them forever.
A moving, honest, and laughter-filled account of eight women who gather one weekend every year and enjoy themselves to the fullest.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5474-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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