by Barbara Robey Egloff Shackett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2013
Entertaining vignettes about an upbeat woman's life and its unusual cast of characters.
In this debut memoir, a retired teacher describes her romantic and other adventures through a series of vignettes.
“I was married six times—to five men,” Shackett announces in the first line of the preface to this book. “One man I married twice. I was widowed twice and divorced four times.” How did all of this happen to a woman, born in 1940, who had what she calls a “very proper” upbringing that began in a 14-room Victorian house in Smethport, Pennsylvania? Shackett, a retired teacher, tries to explain what she calls “my soap-opera past” in this collection of vignettes about her world and that of her friends and family, which included distant relative “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a grandfather’s second cousin. Throughout the book, she writes conversationally, as though telling her stories to a best friend, as she gushes about her first loves, relationship dramas, tender moments with her sister, and vivid memories of her father's protective, loving nature. As the title promises, some stories lack happy endings, such as one involving a boyfriend the author had angered, who dropped her off outside a campsite with minimal supplies and who expected her to find her way home. Shackett seemed to have coped with such experiences partly with a chipper all’s-well-that-ends-well attitude and an intelligence that helps to make her memoir more than just a series of retellings of offbeat or colorful incidents. Often she pauses to reflect on and to try to understand why people she knew behaved as they did and how her choices have shaped her life. The reproductions of old photographs, postcards and newspaper clippings that accompany many of the vignettes provide colorful glimpses of the people she knew and their pursuits. The book touches on sad and even tragic events, such as the deaths of people the author loved, but Shackett stays positive and maintains a welcome objectivity about what happened, refusing to indulge in sentimentality or emotionalism.
Entertaining vignettes about an upbeat woman's life and its unusual cast of characters.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1434928559
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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