by Laura Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2020
A delightful memoir of a fearless and determined woman.
The lost ambience of local pubs is revealed in a warm homage to an indomitable spirit.
“She was the most confident woman I have ever known,” Thompson writes about her glamorous, independent grandmother, the longtime manager of an English pub. Besides offering a loving and vibrant portrait of a woman she “frankly deified,” Thompson examines the pub’s central role in the life of a community, before such venues became gastropubs and twee tourist destinations. “The proper pub,” she notes, “is about far more than having a good time. It accommodates the miserable, the misfits, those who are in their seats at curtain up, having nothing in their lives to make them late: from the moment of waking, they are waiting for the moment of opening.” Her grandmother presided over her motley clientele with toughness, courage, humor, and generosity. The daughter of a pub owner, by the time her father died, she was divorced and, as a single woman, could not inherit the business that she knew she was more than capable of running. But the brewery for which she worked for a time granted her a publican’s license—the first, she claimed, for an Englishwoman who was neither a wife nor a widow—and she turned a decrepit country inn into a successful pub. Thompson spent much time there, working behind the bar when she was a teenager, listening to gossip, observing the vagaries of her grandmother’s customers. The pub, she writes, “was not the whole of my life, nothing like, but it was a backdrop that made me feel luckier” than her classmates who were cloistered in their homes for holidays. “I couldn’t actually imagine Christmas in a private house.” Any pub’s landlady, Thompson writes, has to be “part mother, part nanny, part sorceress, part goddess.” Her grandmother fulfilled those roles with panache: “the supreme landlady, with all that was best in the breed writ large upon her."
A delightful memoir of a fearless and determined woman.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78352-845-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Unbound
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
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The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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