Delicious fun. Kitsy and the rest of the Mean Mommies are caricatures, but who cares?
Another wincingly funny memoir from Rouse (America’s Boy, 2006), who describes moving up from the white-trash Ozarks to white-shoe education.
Hired as director of publicity at Tate Academy (a real school whose actual name and location have been disguised), the author soon learned he was “the mommy handler…the bug guard on the institutional vehicle; I get whacked and splattered, take the hits, so everyone else riding in the car—the administration, the faculty, the staff, the students—stays clean and unharmed from annoying, stinging insects.” Queen Bee here is Katherine Isabelle Ludington, better known as “Kitsy” (a composite portrait), who acts as liaison for the parent and alumni groups whose work Rouse oversees, and usually completes. Whip-thin, sporting a helmeted bob and a Lilly Pulitzer pink outfit (her dog LulaBelle is dressed just like her), Kitsy pulls her Land Rover into the school’s carpool lane and summons Rouse to inform him that his Reunion theme and décor “are simply too boring.” The diabolical Kitsy—think Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada—hasn’t a clue how to treat people. She stiffs the waiters at her country club: “I’m quite certain the service staff is well compensated. A dollar here and a dollar there is just gauche.” She tells a chubby coffee-shop barista, “You know what’s funny? I’ve never met a thin April.” While Rouse recognizes Kitsy as shallow and cruel, the former outsider finds it difficult to stop longing to be a part of the “in” crowd. Will he develop some self-esteem and stand up to this matron from hell? Will he come out of the closet and introduce boyfriend Gary to his colleagues and the alumni? Will he protect the other children from the terrifying offspring of Kitsy and her Botoxed posse? Or will he succumb to the dark side of popularity and entitlement?
Delicious fun. Kitsy and the rest of the Mean Mommies are caricatures, but who cares?Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-38270-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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