Bitterly hilarious in spots.
The modern motherhood memoir in a series of sardonic spoofs.
Creative director and humor writer Harrington reversed the typical American experience of childbearing, working 60-hour weeks while taking care of her newborn children before staying home with them a few years later, when a layoff forced her into freelance work. Using plenty of swear words, as advertised, she chronicles her years on both sides of the mommy wars, tallying the insults of an unenlightened corporate culture and the exquisite tortures of working from home with kids. The narrative features blog-style recollections punctuated with “time-outs”: conceptual interludes featuring hashtags, listicles, pretend dialogues, and quizzes (“Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting?”). The least successful of these experiments are still clever, and though her comedic timing often fizzles, the frenzy of styles and self-conscious gimmicks keeps things lively and justifies her career as a professional thrower of ideas at walls. Harrington embraces the bravado and casual irreverence of the advertising industry even as she mocks it, and she never tires of portraying herself as an ill-fitting matriarch, a Don Draper who awoke one day to find himself leading a Girl Scout troop. The author is at her wittiest when transforming her outrage—especially at the sorry plight of mothers in the United States and their “cultural irrelevance” after maternity leave—into absurd, acerbic commentary. Like all effective satire, Harrington’s best bits arise from deep anger, and she reminds readers that, more than meal trains or forced holidays, mothers desperately need policy reform. Too often, her essays switch unexpectedly into truisms and parenting advice for soul-weary breeders, saccharine (if sincere) messages of encouragement that do not pair well with a plateful of sarcasm. Even if many of her observations and experiences prove more common and less funny than the packaging suggests, her quirky, dissenting energy should resonate with parents who find little use for the usual mommy-blogger fare.
Bitterly hilarious in spots.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-283874-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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