A wry account of the author’s quest to “pitch, plunder, recycle, and sell.”
How a self-identified “amateur hoarder” managed to rid her life of the overabundance of “stuff” that littered her home.
Schaub’s (Year of No Sugar, 2014) “Hell Room” was the largest room in her home—and also the source of her greatest embarrassment. In it, she kept everything from childhood drawings and college telephone records to “dried, hacked-up hairballs” and “rodent fragments.” Eager to rid herself of the burden the Hell Room represented, the author decided to take one year and perform a “clutter-ectomy.” However, she soon discovered that cleaning up decades of accumulated belongings was far more difficult than she could have imagined. Almost everything in the Hell Room, including the rodent fragments, had significance for her. Immediately, she began fearing that her choices would lead to regret. Even after she grudgingly admitted to herself that she might be a “hoarder in the making” and had thrown out or given away boxes and bags of old and/or unusable belongings, large piles of stuff remained. Despairing, she writes, “it felt as if the Hell Room were fighting back.” As she continued sorting through her collection, Schaub confronted some of her past selves, like the “hippie” and the “punk.” Slowly, she began to realize that she had been collecting things as a way of defining herself and fending off mortality; to let go of things was to let go of her past and who she had been. In the end, a much-chastened and more self-aware author managed to almost completely transform her Hell Room—and the rest of her home—into a place where free space became as valued as things had once been. Part memoir and part how-to guide, Schaub’s book casts a lightheartedly humorous light on the First World obsession with acquisition while showing readers that less truly can be more.
A wry account of the author’s quest to “pitch, plunder, recycle, and sell.”Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3355-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
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