A moving and eloquent memoir.
A former book editor and memoirist’s account of the remarkable 35-year friendship that sustained her through the trials and tribulations of adult life.
Thomas (Thinking About Memoir, 2008, etc.) met her best friend, Chuck, when both were working for a New York publisher. They never saw each other outside of the office, where they were “in each other’s pockets” and sometimes mistaken for a couple at work parties. Eventually, Thomas moved on to another job and remarried while Chuck started a family of his own—yet they were never out of touch. Then Chuck had an affair with Thomas’ oldest daughter, Catherine, who had found her way into the publishing world after college. The event rocked Thomas’ world, as well as her friendship with Chuck, because it was “something done behind [her] back.” Not long after that, Thomas’ husband suffered from traumatic brain injuries that would transform him into a bedridden invalid for the rest of his life. Thomas attempted to sever contact with Chuck, but in the end, he would become a steadying presence in her now upended life. With her best friend—and several good dogs by her side—Thomas went on to witness the births of grandchildren, the death of her husband, Catherine’s cancer diagnosis, the signs of her own aging, and Chuck’s struggle with cirrhosis and hepatitis C. These events challenged Thomas to celebrate or rediscover the beauty of life through reflection or her paint-on-glass artwork, just as it challenged her to push beyond the alcoholism that “alleviate[d] the pain or allowed [her] to feel it.” More aware than ever of the fragility of existence, Thomas eventually learned that the one thing that had allowed her to survive was love, which, in its roominess, “allow[ed] for betrayal and loss and dread,” feelings that inevitably come with being alive.
A moving and eloquent memoir.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476785059
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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
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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