A solid addition to the growing genre of short, witty essays written by women about having a career while trying to raise a...
Short takes on life from a writer and mother of small children.
Yearning for an ideal life, Barry (Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories, 2008) and her husband left New York City and good-paying jobs to buy a fixer-upper apartment building near the author’s hometown. Barry planned to write, and her husband planned to start a magazine. They would raise children, eat good food, visit with family and friends, and have a nice home with neighbors just across the hall. What they couldn’t foresee as they embarked on their dreams was the recession of 2008, which threw a corkscrew into their plans. Writing with honesty, a bit of humor and some self-despair, Barry delves into the highs and lows of being a work-at-home writer mom who struggles to balance hours spent writing a novel with the care of two small, rambunctious boys, the need for money and work at a time when no jobs were available, and the thousand other aspects that make up a normal life: trips to the coffee shop, fights with her husband and sister, maintaining a home, enjoying the holidays, etc. Her story reflects the angst felt by many women who try to juggle raising small children with having a career, whether that occupation entails leaving the home on a daily basis or working amid the chaos of a domestic household. The author also explores the overpowering joy one can feel at odd, brief moments when everything coalesces into beauty and love. Interspersed with a smattering of recipes, these short and pithy nuggets offer readers a glimpse into the fears and dreams of a modern woman who balanced work, marriage and kids to the best of her ability.
A solid addition to the growing genre of short, witty essays written by women about having a career while trying to raise a family.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9336-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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