An oddball but endearing combination of meticulous research and winsome enthusiasm.
Middle-aged woman asks the universe for everything she wants and is met with mixed results.
Oxenhandler (Creative Writing/Sonoma State Univ.; The Eros of Parenthood, 2001, etc.) mines her quotidian ups and downs during a 12-month period with the exacting honesty and hopefulness of a Buddhist Anne Lamott. At the beginning of the year, the author articulates exactly what she wishes for at the behest of her friend Carole, an eccentric artist in possession of four homes (three of them in France) who usually “finds a way to acquire” everything she wants. Oxenhandler’s chief desires are to own a house and find a romantic partner. Over the next several months, she undertakes everything from building shrines in the likeness of her individual wishes to reading a vast array of books on the subject of manifesting desire. As a practicing Buddhist, she has long eschewed the open hunger for material things; her shift on this subject comprises one of the book’s more interesting aspects. Doors begin to open: She has an opportunity to buy the house she’s been renting in northern California, and she meets a man who possesses every quality she’d hoped for in a mate. The greatest challenge here involves maintaining the reader’s interest, which may wane in the absence of any major dramatic tension. Descriptions of myriad encounters with friends too plentiful to name sometimes grate, as does Oxenhandler’s freehanded way with quotations. The chapter in which she tries to “wish away a wart” is hardly engrossing. Ultimately, though, following her through a generally successful year, readers come away with the feeling that there’s something wonderfully quixotic about her belief in the power of wishing.
An oddball but endearing combination of meticulous research and winsome enthusiasm.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6485-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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