Neither revelatory nor magnanimous.
Upon discovering that her late husband cheated on her with multiple women, the author began researching his affairs.
In early 2003, graphic designer and freelance writer Metz heard a crash in her suburban New York house. It was her husband Henry, collapsing from a pulmonary embolism. In the first months following his death, the author carried on raising their six-year-old daughter, Liza, while grieving and starting a relationship with Tomas, a friend of the couple. Then Metz found out about her late husband’s adultery, setting her off on a witch hunt to find the women he’d been with. Searching for clues, she combed through illicit e-mails and Henry’s journal (she quotes passages from each), then contacted his former lovers—scattered across the continent, all of them his type of “little brunettes”—to ask personal questions and furiously curse them out. The affair most upsetting to her was with Cathy, a local friend and mother of Liza’s good friend. Metz repeatedly called Cathy names, reported the affair to Cathy’s husband and broke up the daughters’ friendship before concluding that the town was too small for both of them. The irony that the author fails to acknowledge as she describes her efforts to uproot the adulterous secrets was that she and Henry had a largely unhappy and unloving marriage. Toward the end, she admits, they were “barely able to have a peaceful conversation.” She blames the failure of their union on his wandering eye and ceaseless search for perfection. Her claim that she ultimately let go of blaming Henry seems disingenuous, since the legacy she leaves both readers and her daughter is this vapid, mean-spirited record. The book’s final third chronicles her successful online-dating quest for a new mate and subsequent move back to Brooklyn.
Neither revelatory nor magnanimous.Pub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2255-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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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