Waggish entertainment on a single woman’s search for a life partner.
How a British comedian and actress has tried to avoid growing up at all costs.
When two of her friends announced they were having a baby, Suttie, whose Pearl and Dave radio show won a Sony Radio Academy Award, suddenly realized that those around her were beginning to grow up and that her life was inevitably going to change. To delay the process, she embarked on a series of escapades, which she relates here—e.g., swimming naked in the frigid ocean, creating a 5-foot-tall papier-mâché penguin, or dating a guy who speaks mainly in rhyme. Ultimately, of course, she did get older, her friends had the baby and moved into their own little house, and she was out of luck in finding the one true love of her life. Suttie recounts her various friendships and romantic relationships, including her stint with an Aussie who provided fun and sex without entanglement, and her work as a comic, which didn’t pay well most of the time but provided a venue for her off-beat humor—e.g., “Christmas Day was the club sandwich it always is: thin layers of pleasure, primarily due to food or excitement about what to watch on TV, interspersed with rich slabs of ennui and bickering.” The author’s brief chapters are mostly humorous and contain at least a bit of oddball charm, exposing aspects of Suttie that few readers probably know. The author occasionally includes crudely drawn cartoons for emphasis, many (if not all) of which could have been omitted. There are some gems in this lightweight look at navigating the single world, but the book is mainly good for a quick laugh before moving on. For more depth, turn to Tig Notaro’s I’m Just a Person (2016).
Waggish entertainment on a single woman’s search for a life partner.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-257197-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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