Pedestrian epiphanies like these suggest that, while Cheney may have conquered mental illness, she hasn’t yet overcome the...
An attorney writes about her decades-long struggle with manic depression.
It would be easier to feel sorry about the degradations, depressions and rejections Cheney has endured if she didn’t spend so much time making sure that we also know how hot she is. She was a high-school varsity cheerleader, has spectacular red hair (all hers—no highlights), attracts males like moths and elicits catty comments from jealous women. She can steal your boyfriend—and will, even if you’re her best friend—and out-rev you at the stoplight with her Porsche. (She got a vintage Corvette for her Sweet 16; one boyfriend drove a Lamborghini.) She graduated with honors from Vassar College, where during one of her bad periods she prowled late-night dorm corridors and ate from garbage cans. After law school, she quickly landed a prestigious job with an L.A. firm specializing in celebrity cases. For years she deceived her employers about her addiction to various prescription drugs. For years she practiced the yo-yo diet, binging and purging. She had a dozen electroshock treatments. She tried to kill herself in a variety of ways. Again, we’d feel worse for Cheney if her tortured accounts of fate’s blows weren’t accompanied by a parade of attractive men who find her irresistible, except for that darn mental illness of hers. The book is almost more embarrassing when she tries to tell us What She Has Learned. A Masai girl covered in sores who can nonetheless smile and a horribly disfigured woman whom Cheney comforts by stroking her beautiful blonde hair appear to exist solely to demonstrate the author’s ability to see that others are actually worse off than she is.
Pedestrian epiphanies like these suggest that, while Cheney may have conquered mental illness, she hasn’t yet overcome the solipsism manifest on every page of her boundlessly self-absorbed memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-143023-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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