A hammy but occasionally compelling story of love’s humiliations.
Stevens recounts his struggles in love in this debut memoir.
After receiving candid relationship advice from his grandmother at a young age, the American author has been perennially unlucky in love—but always willing to give it another shot. In this collection of anecdotes, culled from decades of good, bad, and ugly romantic encounters, he plumbs the depths of human desire and indignity to which love has brought him. Stevens takes readers through the embarrassing, inadvisable, unlikely, and incredible events that have marked his relationships with women, from grade school crushes and awkward teenage sexual encounters to rushing into marriage with a woman and experimenting with online dating. A self-described “sexy ogre” (“not exactly attractive like The Rock, but has a good personality, kind of like Shrek”), Stevens nevertheless gets many chances at love, though they’re often upended by a lack of honesty (or too much of it), misunderstandings, infidelity, incompatibility, or plain old boredom. Of course, these hazards await anyone who dips a toe into the sea of love; the thing that matters is what one learns from the experience. Stevens has apparently learned a lot—several times over—and he wants to share it all in this work. To that end, he writes in an exuberant, jocular prose that attempts to keep the reader forever on his or her toes: “Have you ever gotten a date because of ferrets?” begins one chapter. “I can say that I have, and it was a really awesome experience too!” Unfortunately, this authorial personality can sometimes be difficult to bear. The book routinely refers to women as “lasses” and demonstrates dated views on gender roles: “If she is wrong and you gloat about it, you could find yourself sleeping in the doghouse without any treats. If you smile about it, you could be wiped off the face of the earth with a simple glare, and fellows, you know the glare I’m talking about.” If readers can get past this schtick, however, they’ll find a sometimes-engaging story of one man’s complex relationships.
A hammy but occasionally compelling story of love’s humiliations.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1522-9
Page Count: 412
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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