Long on inventiveness but short on substance.
Ephemera from the life of a children’s book author.
In her latest book for grown-ups, Rosenthal (Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, 2005, etc.) again organizes stories of her life into something like a reference book or textbook. The author largely eschews written narrative in favor of a broad smattering of tables, graphs, drawings, photos, a guitar chord progression, a recipe, a dream, a Venn diagram, and more. Section headings like Geography, History, and Math divide and contain these tidbits along with mildly interesting thoughts and anecdotes: a moment's conjecture at who her husband is on the phone with, her faulty interpretation of a magazine article, her decision to leave an unopened packet of honey on the passenger-side floor of her car. One page reads, "When I came back from India, I was absolutely, positively 100% sure I was going to use a lot of turmeric." The book is light; white space abounds. Perhaps aware of this, Rosenthal leaps from the page into her readers’ digital lives, inviting them to text her for various multimedia experiences: three audio renditions of a humming wineglass or a poem read by the deceased poet Kenneth Koch. There is one anomalous short story in the Romance section that, despite its brevity (or because of it), is a moving tale of life, love, and anagrams. Readers who approach this book as a collection of thought experiments will find intermittent inspiration. Photos of two ice cubes—one from the waters of Lake Michigan, the other containing tea from a restaurant—poignantly commemorate moments with her children, and in “The Piñata Experiment,” the author instructs the reader to hang a candy-filled piñata near a baseball field and wait for the object's discovery by Little Leaguers serendipitously wielding baseball bats.
Long on inventiveness but short on substance.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98454-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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