A kind marital gesture, but lacking universality.
Kirsch’s travelogue-cum-soul-search contains ruminations on what he learned from four days in London.
The diary-style narrative recounts the first leg of a weeklong European trip Kirsch and his wife Julie take to celebrate their 40th birthdays and 15th wedding anniversary. Like many Americans abroad, the narrator expresses impatience and disappointment with the Old Country. Why is it so stuffy, so inconvenient, so boring, so expensive? Where can a guy get a good steak? He takes the macho tone, albeit in a good-natured way–poking fun, scoffing, opting out whenever art or culture rear their ugly heads. The National Gallery? Yawn. Billy Elliot? “A chick play.” Big Ben? Big deal. While Julie visits the British Museum, the author sits in a café and reads the sports page. Julie comes to Europe with reverence, toting guidebooks, lists and schedules–she studied English lit and this trip is her dream so she wants to see it all. But she must drag around this awkward bundle of muted dissatisfactions, parking him on a bench when necessary. Harrods proves to be a saving grace since the author is particularly ardent about retail–he’s a grocer back home in Chevy Chase, Md. His candor is initially disarming–some of his wisecracks speak to a secret rebellion lurking in Americans against forever worshipping at the altar of European Cultural Superiority. His effort to retain his good humor in the face of the indignities and absurdities of foreign travel fosters sympathy. Further, the book serves well as an apology, a collection of memories and a love letter to his wife. Ultimately, however, the humor seems a bit shopworn and sophomoric, as does the self-conscious introspection in later chapters. Thus the book seems best-suited to its target audience–the author’s loved one.
A kind marital gesture, but lacking universality.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60145-704-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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