A witty, observant, deliciously satisfying autobiography.
A quirky, irreverent story of growing up odd in the 1970s, when people still wrote letters, loved shag carpeting and used carbon paper.
Fox Television radio-marketing executive Poole grew up in the Midwest in a family, and among an assortment of characters, destined to end up in a coming-of-age memoir. Some of the more entertaining stories include the chaos of his parents’ fighting in 1969; the author’s befriending of the sarcastic, armless Stacy (who “exhibit[ed] her stumps to the amazement and awe of the gathered fourth-graders”); his magical obsessions with Bewitched, which included an unhealthy attachment to Endora; and his failed exorcism of another boy in Bible school. From his early childhood, when he escaped into his family’s basement to chant magical charms to ward off alienation and chaos, through his teenage years, when the normal teenager panic was amplified by the added bewilderment of his awakening homosexuality, Poole shares an intimate, self-effacing chronicle of a unique young boy and the forces that molded him into the grounded, articulate, charming oddball he is today. The real charm of the book lies in the authenticity of the humor. There is not one forced moment in the book, nor is there a stitch of disingenuous manipulation to get a cheap laugh or manufacture a setup to a joke. Each entertaining tidbit grows from the characters, their lives, their struggles and their unforgivably shameless honesty. This is the story of growing up as the exception, but learning to understand that if you’re lucky and have the right mix of crazy people in your life, being the exception can morph into being exceptional.
A witty, observant, deliciously satisfying autobiography.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15655-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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