Often scattershot but never boring, Chesler's memoir will raise more than a few hackles.
The author of Women and Madness (1972) looks back with a sharp eye at her sometimes-contentious engagement with the second-wave feminist revolution launched in the 1960s.
Working from evidently voluminous diaries, Chesler (Emerita, Psychology and Women’s Studies/CUNY; Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women, 2017, etc.) constructs a frequently scattered and highly entertaining account of her undomesticated life. Born in 1940 and brought up in Brooklyn by Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents, she rebelled early and often and was delighted to find fellow rebels among other mid-20th-century feminists. Though she made some lasting friends, her delight wasn't enduring, and she devotes much of the book to settling scores with former friends and delineating the “incomprehensibly vicious behavior among feminist leaders.” She was scorned by many of her peers because she was a “man junkie” and “hopelessly straight.” Readers familiar with figures like Gloria Steinem and Andrew Dworkin will either be delighted or appalled by gossipy accounts of consciousness-raising groups where, for example, lesbian activist Jill Johnston “cried and made a scene—she actually threw potato chips at us—then left and refused to return.” Chesler describes one of her comrades as a “lesbian lush” and another as “a hot Jewish tamale.” Those who don't already know the major players are likely to be confused, since the author tends to drop names without much elaboration. Some of her claims—e.g., that “every woman I knew had had an abortion”—strain credulity, and the chapter titles suggest the author’s chatty, rapid-fire approach to narrative: “Fame Hits Hard, Thousands of Letters Arrive, I Marry Again”; “I Travel the Wide World, Pray at the Western Wall, and Come to the Aid of Lesbian-Feminists Under Siege in Mississippi.”
Often scattershot but never boring, Chesler's memoir will raise more than a few hackles.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09442-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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