by Rebecca Eckler ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2005
The self-absorption can be off-putting, but the frankness, quirky style and light touch are a winning combination even so.
The art of navel-gazing carried to a new high (or low) in a sometimes whiny and exasperating, yet very funny diary of a pregnancy from six hours after conception to two weeks after C-section.
Eckler, a lifestyle columnist for Canada’s National Post, a job that involves interviewing celebrities and covering film and bar openings, is sure she’s pregnant when she wakes up the morning after her engagement party. A couple of weeks later, she confirms it with no fewer than four home pregnancy tests. When she proposes writing about it for the National Post, her boss agrees and gives the story a front-page headline. A minor celebrity in her own right, and an unabashed fan of celebrities (“Kate Hudson is pregnant! I’m so excited. It’s so much better when you live your life alongside a celebrity’s. It makes what you’re going through all the more relevant”), Eckler is determined that pregnancy and motherhood won’t change her glamorous, party-girl life. She divides her diary, based on her columns in the Post, into trimesters, “The Longest Three Months of My Life,” “The Fat Months” and “The Even Fatter Months.” Appearance is clearly paramount. While pleased when her breasts grow fuller, she is appalled when her eating-for-two diet of Big Macs and fries shows up on her hips. “Is my ass fat?” she asks again and again and again of the nameless father-to-be, referred to throughout as simply “the fiancé.” Meanwhile, she worries that a certain “Sexy Young Intern” is after her job, acquires an attentive new friend, “Cute Single Man,” and struggles to keep up with her single, designer-clad, still slim, barhopping girlfriends. Not to be mistaken for a pregnancy guide, Eckler’s chronicle offers little advice, unless you count the recommendation to get a bikini wax and a pedicure before going to the hospital.
The self-absorption can be off-putting, but the frankness, quirky style and light touch are a winning combination even so.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47575-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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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