An intelligent, hilarious, and bittersweet collection.
The TV and stage actress turns the messes of her life into fodder for this winning essay collection.
Weedman (A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body: (Tales from a Life of Cringe), 2007) describes her theatrical career as "walking around traumatized every five minutes and making a two-hour show about it." Throughout her latest book, she remains ruthlessly self-deprecating—“maybe I was the hero [of her stories], but I was so opposed to coming off as the hero that I exaggerated myself into an abusive idiot for laughs”—and consistently funny. She tells how she once imprudently moved into "a quaint little month-to-month studio that seemed artsy because it had a shared bathroom ‘like an artists' commune,’ but the place turned out to be an SRO that house[d] mostly male ex-convicts.” Of her triumphant high school years, she breezily writes, “I was just a teen with a weight problem who loved a man with chiseled cheekbones and a caustic wit. A simple midwestern gal who loved her gay choir teacher.” Other accounts—about miserable boyfriends and her meetings with her glib and caustic birth mother—elicit cringes, but they are simply landmarks that lead to the heart of the book. Weedman tones down the humor when she discusses her attempts at a lifestyle that has eluded her. She keenly feels like "a middle-aged white lady from L.A.”—no more so than when a young bartender dryly commented on how she looked "very dolled up" for what she intended to be an exciting night on the town in a new city. The author projects a mood of low-key resignation, reflecting on the spectrum of adulthood, from the 20s to the 40s, and she sneakily plants seeds of melancholy and wisdom amid the laughs.
An intelligent, hilarious, and bittersweet collection.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-218023-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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