Weaver’s adequate-but-no-more prose is perfectly suited to her tedious tale.
Self-absorbed memoir of a conventionally dysfunctional childhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The product of a well-heeled May-December marriage, Weaver spent her childhood in the care of nurses and nannies, feeling out of place at the posh parties her family attended. She adored her distant father, but had more mixed feelings about Mom, an alcoholic who insisted that her morning Bloody Mary was really Mr. & Mrs. T mix without the vodka, and who tried to mask the liquor on her breath with Binaca. Unsurprisingly, Weaver herself first got drunk at age nine (on a cruise ship in Alaska) and by 14 had become a regular lush. She ran through packs of cigarettes so quickly that even her super-cool shrink was concerned, and no one believed her when, after her mother found pot in her room, she claimed she was just holding it for a friend. She bounced from school to school, finally landing at Cascade, an institution in California that blended academics with an intense therapeutic protocol bordering on brainwashing. (Near the end of the book, she explains that Cascade, now closed, was in fact the offshoot of a cult.) Next came college and a spell in the California rave scene, followed by a move back to New York, where Weaver lived in the East Village, got into photography, took Ketamine and shared needles with an HIV-positive buddy. She’s currently recovered, though she makes it clear that hers is a complex sort of recovery in an irksomely self-important and melodramatic way: “What would you say if I told you that I slipped up and did cocaine two summers ago?”
Weaver’s adequate-but-no-more prose is perfectly suited to her tedious tale.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-118958-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HC/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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