Embarrassing.
Carrie Bradshaw meets the AARP in this mediocre meta-memoir.
Shortly before her 50th birthday, music journalist Ganahl was asked to write a column for the San Francisco Chronicle about being single and middle-aged. Here, we read about the dates that she wrote about for the paper; snippets of the actual column; some of the emails she received in response to the column; about the dates she decided not to chronicle in the Chronicle. In short, this is a tedious, repetitive and sophomoric book. Ganahl’s advanced age—advanced, that is, for a swinging singleton tell-all—seems only to have given her wrinkles. What the years haven’t imparted is wisdom. To wit her on-again off-again affair with a jazz musician named Lenny. Over and over, he dallies with her, and still Ganahl keeps going back for more; the penultimate page finds her pathetically leaving him asleep in a hotel as she slinks off alone to her 50th birthday party. It’s hard to know if she’s being serious or satirical when she exclaims things like, “But he shared his feelings with me! It was like a miracle. At this moment, I can almost believe this is the beginning of a new chapter for us. One that might actually lead to love.” One of the few threads that makes this book bearable is Ganahl’s depiction of her charming 20-something daughter, Erin, who is a paragon of filial devotion. (At the same time, Erin’s astute common-sense underscores her mother’s lack of insight.) Ganahl also tells some truly funny stories about horrible dates: There’s the lawyer from Louisiana who flew to California to meet Ganahl after reading her column, only to get plastered halfway through their date, and the environmental activist who confesses love to Ganahl while under the influence of Ecstasy. But readers will cringe a lot more than they’ll chuckle.
Embarrassing.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03824-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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