A very funny but sometimes self-indulgent account of life chasing art and avoiding responsibility.
Christopher (Emily’s Little Pilot of Loquacious Weather, 2013, etc.) has figured out the secret to consistently landing a job on the quick: brazenly, confidently lie about your credentials. Here’s his comedic, meandering quest to find quick employment and avoid a long-lasting career.
In the midst of an ailing job market, this is an especially timely book. Covering two decades and 81 jobs, this series of first-person essays charts an eclectic and in some ways strangely impressive tour of jobs. Christopher visits both the highs and lows of employment, working as a writer, a mortuary driver, a plumber’s assistant and a copy editor of gay porn. At that last gig, once outed as a heterosexual, he was the victim of sexual harassment perpetrated by a female superior. The tone is always breezy and ironic, though the constant posture of cleverness can sometimes grate as it becomes a kind of “too cool for school” aversion to bourgeois careerism. Thankfully, the book can be lively and genuinely hilarious as well as bracingly self-critical. Somewhat frustratingly, though, despite a few mentions of personal autonomy and being “the protagonist in your own living novel,” it’s not exactly clear why the author insists on such an itinerant lifestyle. “I’ve never subscribed to that old-fashioned American Dream of having just one career for 35 years, followed by a cane-bound trance of heart medications, hip problems and Law & Order,” he says. “Nothing scares me more, to be honest, even as I near dangerously close to middle age myself. Instead, I prefer to taste life. I prefer to taste many lives, actually.” Responding to a command from his father to essentially get a job, not to mention a life, he reflects: “But then from out of nowhere springs a statement so profound and so uncommonly logical as: I need to live life in order to write about life. So simple yet so philosophical—existential, even.” What redeems much of the shallowness here is that Christopher is much more than what he claims to be, “a professional pretender for a decent paycheck and health insurance.” After all, while tasting many lives, he’s written four books.
A very funny but sometimes self-indulgent account of life chasing art and avoiding responsibility.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990573203
Page Count: 294
Publisher: BH Publications Pte Ltd.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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