A unique, poised, and polished first book from a respected actress.
An award-winning actress’s collection of never-sent literary missives to the men who have most influenced her personal development.
In this accomplished debut, Parker, who has won Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards, traces her life story through a series of essays that she addresses to the “manly creature[s]” who have made her into the woman she is. Her first letters are to male members of her immediate family, including her grandfather and father. Both anchored her to a family heritage, and both are individuals in whom she catches glimpses of herself and her children. From there, Parker radiates outward to others, such as the “Yacqui Indian Boy” and the “Risk Taker” singing star, who gave her glimpses of worlds that existed beyond the small town she knew growing up. Like the Indian Boy and the Risk Taker, her addressees are often men who educated her in ways she never expected. A college “movement teacher” who gave Parker a negative evaluation of her work and self-presentation not only taught her the wisdom of “[l]etting someone you don’t really like surprise you,” but also an important lesson in humility. Some, like the three men she collectively refers to as Cerberus, taught her to value herself through the hard lessons in mistreatment they gave her. Others, like the nameless New York City cab driver upon whom she heaped unmerited blame and abuse, become the objects of apology and of musings on who she was at particular moments in time. Still others, like “Gorgeous” and “Oyster Picker,” are creations of the author’s fertile imagination and express, on the one hand, her longings for the perfect man and reconnection with her beloved dead father on the other. Parker's missives move effortlessly among nostalgia, intensity, and playfulness, but in the end, they all work together to reveal both the small and large ways in which we impact each other.
A unique, poised, and polished first book from a respected actress.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0783-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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