by Paul Samuel Dolman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2013
Pleasant enough beach reading for romantics and believers in fate but probably not for fans of Larry David.
Light, summery memoir of a journey toward healing from a relationship gone slightly sour.
Once a successful entrepreneur in the music industry in Nashville, Dolman (What Matters Most: Intimate Interviews with Notable Nashvillians, 1997) found himself wanting an indefinable something more than his big house and trophy wife. So he sold his business and traveled west to California, where strange coincidences led him to meet a woman he almost instantly considered his soul mate. To his great surprise and bitter disappointment, the relationship did not survive the couple’s return to Nashville, where “the Miracle” (as he refers to the otherwise unnamed woman throughout the book) wanted more of a commitment than he did and began looking for it with someone else. Devastated by this apparent betrayal—not just by the woman but also by the universe—Dolman went to his octogenarian parents’ summer home on Martha’s Vineyard to lick his wounds for a couple of weeks. He wound up spending an entire season there, hitchhiking and biking the island with no larger agenda than eating donuts and ice cream, swimming and sunbathing, and meeting random Vineyard denizens, including, yes, Larry David of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. The first conversation between Dolman (hitchhiker) and David (ride purveyor) is the highlight of the book, not because of anything the two strangers discuss but due to the fact that David’s acerbic misanthropy adds a delightfully real contrast to the otherwise sugary-sweet goings-on. Dolman was once a motivational speaker, and it shows. He approaches most conversations like group therapy, where everyone shares Oprah-like wisdom about the pains and joys of life, but nothing goes much deeper than standard Hollywood “life lessons.”
Pleasant enough beach reading for romantics and believers in fate but probably not for fans of Larry David.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59240-826-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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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 Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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