Though the narrative is uneven, Keane provides a lyrical, sharp feminist analysis of her family’s history.
The editor-in-chief of Salon analyzes her mother’s past as a runaway in the context of popular culture’s tendency to prioritize men’s stories over those of women.
When Keane’s father died when she was 5, he left behind a mystical presence that ignited her curiosity in a way her mother’s story never did. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she thought critically about the fact that her father was 20 years older than her mother, that her mother was 15 when they got married, and that, at the time, her father “had lost about a decade to heroin addiction.” When she finally grasped the nature of her parents’ marriage, she decided to interview her mother about her past as a runaway who lived under multiple pseudonyms after leaving home at the age of 12. Her mother told her harrowing stories about hitchhiking at a “thumbing station” in Aspen, going to jail in Boston, and surviving sexual assault in New York—a brutal ordeal in which “she saw and felt nothing but pain and horror.” In telling this family story, Keane interrogates her own long-standing fascination with the stories of questionable men: in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, for example, or the story “The Singing Bone” by the Brothers Grimm, or Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. “A girl becomes visible to the world, stories like Manhattan taught me, when a man appears next to her in the frame,” writes the author. When telling her mother’s story, Keane’s prose soars, and her journalistic instincts shine. At one point, she finds a record of her mother’s arrest thanks to her connection with a particularly persistent archivist—clearly no small feat. However, the comments on popular culture often feel like an unnecessary detour from the main story, and it lacks the depth and feeling of the compelling autobiographical sections.
Though the narrative is uneven, Keane provides a lyrical, sharp feminist analysis of her family’s history.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953368-31-7
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.
Daytime television’s most recognizable actress digs deeper in this second memoir.
Her career-defining, four decades–long stint on the daytime soap All My Children as the villainous Erica Kane has made Lucci a recognizable household name in daytime television circles. In this sophomore effort, comprised of a vivid and engaging collection of anecdotes and adventures, the actress reveals more intimate details of her struggles as well as her personal life and professional career. From the time she began performing in high school stage musicals, Lucci admits to always wanting to be onstage. Working through chronic shyness, her self-motivation and spirit drove her to pursue an acting career despite the many disappointments, callous dismissals, and various roadblocks that stood in her way. She expresses an open admiration for her parents, fellow performers who mentored her up the Hollywood ladder, and Muhammad Ali, who “owned his excellence,” as models of inspiration. Other sections reflect on her time as a working mother, the tricks to “growing old gracefully,” and how her faith, quest for joy, love of reading, and zest for life continue to sustain her. In an effort to create a more balanced memoir, Lucci also opens up to candidly share several sad and unsavory moments like being told she should probably abandon a career in television because she was too “ethnic looking”; the devastating day All My Children was canceled; the near loss of her son, Andreas, as an infant; and the feeling, upon the death of her husband, Helmut, in 2022, that the light within her “had gone out forever.” However crushing these events in her life were, they were counterbalanced with uplifting triumphs and only served as motivators to continue pushing forward to seek out the success and happiness she knew she deserved. With verve and perseverance, Lucci gleefully boasts about her starring roles in off-Broadway hits and concurrent film roles, yet, in her late 70s, she remains deeply grateful and humble and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798874868284
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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