An entertaining miscellany by a sharp-eyed observer.
A self-described “goofball” cheerfully reflects on life.
Taking up from where she left off in her last essay collection, Mastromonaco (Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, 2017), Barack Obama’s former White House deputy chief of staff for operations, gathers essays, random thoughts, and interviews that add up to a merry gloss on politics, campaign work for John Kerry and Obama, her stint in the White House, dating (a guy who collected Beanie Babies, for example) and breaking up, watching Friends and Sex and the City, the health problem—irritable bowel syndrome—she wrote about in the previous book, how social media has changed politics, and many other topics, including Donald Trump. Although she was scolded by Amazon reviewers for TMI, she can’t help but return to the IBS theme, warning readers who may not “appreciate knowing the details of strangers’ gastrointestinal lives” to skip to her essay on getting her period. “I’m a forty-two-year-old woman with the diet of a picky seven-year-old and the bathroom habits of a seventy-two-year-old. What can I do but talk about it?” She also discusses her long, initially futile search to find comfortable underwear, which ended, happily, with “Gap stretch-cotton hipsters, size large.” The essays are interspersed with lists: favorite songs, things you should never say to your boss, what’s in her suitcase; and interviews with Susan Rice, Monica Lewinsky (a dear friend), Dan Pfeiffer (her Platonic Life Partner), and Chelsea Handler. The brief conversations are as frothy as the essays. Pfeiffer tells her that “the key to any lifelong friendship/platonic partnership is trust.” Rice encourages young women to “do what you are passionate about.” Mastromonaco surely has followed that advice, and in looking back on her career, she reflects thoughtfully on her decision not to have a child. Most pieces are funny and many, insightful. “If I’ve learned anything in my life,” she writes, “it’s that the line between nonsense and wisdom is very thin.”
An entertaining miscellany by a sharp-eyed observer.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3155-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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