Further evidence that the world does not need another histrionic, self-important blog-turned-book.
A debut memoir billed as the lighthearted chronicle of a dedicated virgin’s dating adventures.
Pseudonymous blogger Broadway begins with her home-schooled Christian youth and continues through college and out into the working world. She describes her attempt to balance her relationship with Jesus and her desperate desire to find a husband in an off-putting, pretentious manner. The book is peppered with barely relevant quotes from revered intellectual brand names (e.g., Alain de Botton), and the author likes to bemoan her inability to find people on her intellectual level. That level doesn’t seem very lofty in the frequent and ridiculous quotes from Broadway’s journal. It would take a very determined and generous reader, for example, to find any relevance to the author’s marital or spiritual state in this entry from December 10, 2000: “It seems to me, suddenly, as if I had spent quite some time fixating on sandcastles. All around me, as a child, I saw other people enjoying them…Then one day I came out of my house, and there it was: my sandcastle. As I leaned closer to inspect the exactness of the exterior, however, a curious smell assailed my nostrils. I realized the castle wasn’t sand at all—but rather shit.” In this thicket of bad prose, it’s difficult to track the author’s many failed “relationships” with ludicrously nicknamed men (“the Winner,” “Poster Boy,” etc.), most of whom appear to be unaware that they’re in a relationship at all.
Further evidence that the world does not need another histrionic, self-important blog-turned-book.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51839-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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