Newlyweds and couples looking to jump-start a foundering relationship will find Piazza’s analysis of marriage useful,...
How women from different cultures handle the complexities of marriage.
Before journalist Piazza (co-author: The Knockoff, 2015, etc.) met her future husband, she had a successful career and good friends, and she knew how to live happily by herself. After marriage, she had to adjust to having another person in her life on a continuous basis, and like many newlyweds, she wondered if she was doing it correctly. “Marriage experts,” she writes, “call the first year of marriage ‘the wet cement year,’ because it’s the time when both members of a couple are figuring out how to exist as partners without getting stuck in the murk. It’s a time to set and test boundaries and create habits that continue for the rest of your marriage.” This idea led the author to ponder how women in other countries adjusted to sharing space, money, time, and all the other minor and major aspects that affect the union of two people under one roof. To smooth their own “wet cement,” Piazza and her husband traveled around the globe for work and pleasure, and she interviewed women from all walks of life about their secrets to a successful marriage. The answers were useful, humorous, seductive, and often far more intricate than she imagined. Among dozens of other pieces of advice, her interview subjects suggested to create a comfortable home, wear sexy lingerie (paid for by the man) on a daily basis, take care of yourself first, discuss most subjects but keep some things hidden, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, allow yourself to go to bed angry. Piazza blends the life stories of these interviewees with her own struggles during those first 12 months of matrimony.
Newlyweds and couples looking to jump-start a foundering relationship will find Piazza’s analysis of marriage useful, amusing, and engaging.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0451495556
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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