British comedy-star Everage, nÇe Barry Humphreys, takes us little people into her confidence with this terribly earnest autobiography of an Australian housewife turned megacelebrity— broad but successful buffoonery in the Monty Python tradition. Let's face it, Possums, not everyone is destined for megastardom—but Dame Everage makes if perfectly clear that the signs of greatness hung over her from birth. First, there was the mauve hair, which she modestly colored brown during her young- mother period in Moonee Ponds, the suburb of Melbourne where she grew up. Then there was the quick intelligence that made her captain of her class in school (``I'm sorry but I was''), and, of course, the ``spooky'' karma left over from her former lives as Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, Lady Macbeth, Florence Nightingale, and Ethel Merman—reincarnations that even the Dame's good friend Shirl is terribly jealous of. And of course the appearance of her stunning ``face furniture,'' the signature butterfly-shaped eyeglasses with the jumbo upsweeps at the corners, didn't hurt her determinedly cheerful image. As the good Dame breathlessly describes her marriage to dear Norman Stoddart Everage, a former department-store clerk destined for 24-hour prostate support; her struggle to find someone to raise her three children properly; her love-hate relationship with her envious bridesmaid and companion, Madge Allsop; and her first encounter with fame as winner of Australia's ``Lovely Mother Quest,'' it becomes clear that Everage's philosophy of simply getting up on a stage and giving her grateful audiences ``a gentle, blow-by-blow description of a housewife's life'' is the key to sold-out performances in London theaters and long, late-night phone conversations with her good friends Liz, Jackie, Marlon, Gore, et al. No Plom's (Poor Little Old Me) Disease here—though readers who haven't yet seen one of Edna's performances may be left a bit bewildered.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70976-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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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