The funny bits in this Everyman’s true-life stories will remind readers to look on the bright side of life.
Debut author Aboulafia highlights absurd and memorable events from his life in humorous autobiographical essays.
The author writes that he envisions memory as a series of still images strung together, and his strategy in this episodic memoir is to provide back stories for those snapshots. One of his first memories of growing up in the Bronx is a moment of disappointment when he fell and crushed a school diorama project. Many of the scenes that follow are more lighthearted, though, with good comic setups and patter. “Soft Ball,” one of the most tightly constructed narratives, relies on the title’s double meaning: while playing softball, the author was hit in the nether regions and endured days of internal bleeding and swelling. Doctors suggested that he might need a testicle removed; luckily, he sought another opinion and avoided surgery. Later pieces echo previous ones in satisfying ways; for example, the sports theme returns in an essay about the author’s father’s forged baseball autographs, while anatomical jesting resumes in a story about picking up his dog from a neutering. In chatty, self-deprecating prose, Aboulafia shakes his head at his youthful high jinks. He realizes how lucky he is that his recklessness never turned out worse; at various points, for example, he ate six moldy Devil Dogs while engrossed in a horror film, ran out of gas on a freezing night in Maine, and had a sewer cover fly toward him on the Long Island Expressway. Even in his adult life, haplessness followed his family: a honeymoon mudslide, an ill-fated kayaking trip, food poisoning, and so on. Although Aboulafia generally plays the clown, one of the best pieces, “Revelation,” is a serious one in which a scrap of shell he spots on a gloomy beach walk restores his sense of wonder: “We can forget that we are blessed with the good things in our lives and that we are surrounded, everywhere, by the divine music of this world. It is there for those of us who choose to hear.”
The funny bits in this Everyman’s true-life stories will remind readers to look on the bright side of life.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Library Tales Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
