Funny, touching essays on being a multifaceted woman with unique dreams, desires, and needs.
A TV and radio host acknowledges her need to be liked and tells how she’s worked hard to overcome this.
Comedian and journalist Salie wittily lays bare the highs and lows of her life (so far) and explains how much of what she’s done has been because she’s “an approval junkie.” When she told people the title of this book, some immediately understood what she was trying to do, while others looked at her askance. “At which point,” she writes, “I put down the cake I was frosting for them while simultaneously breastfeeding my daughter and doing squats and explained that I’m not ashamed about wanting approval. It kept my high school GPA very high. It’s kept my BMI somewhat low. It’s kept me on my toes when I wasn’t already wearing heels to elongate my legs.” Salie tells readers about falling in and out of love with her “wasband,” the struggles she’s had over the years with her weight, losing her virginity and telling her mother about it the next day, receiving hand job instructions from her gay brother, and a host of other intimate details about her personal life. The author talks about her mother’s illness and death, her difficulty in conceiving children as an older woman and the fertility treatments she endured, her various jobs on TV and radio, and falling in love with her new husband. Salie uses humor throughout her short essays, particularly in the beginning. As the book progresses, the moments she discusses are more tender than humorous, allowing readers a closer perspective on the author’s life. Salie’s children also make appearances in short narratives about miscarriages, the desire for a girl, and breast-feeding and breast pumps. She concludes with a sweet letter to her daughter, in which she urges her to “care a lot about winning your own approval—enough to stretch, appreciate, and occasionally embarrass yourself.”
Funny, touching essays on being a multifaceted woman with unique dreams, desires, and needs.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-41993-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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