Funny and affecting in parts, but on the whole disappointing.
After recounting her experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome in National Book Award nominee Passing for Normal (1999), Wilensky now chronicles her younger sister’s struggle with obesity and its impact on their relationship.
The author has two stories to tell here. One is of growing up with Alison, only 13 months her junior, who’s fat and then becomes thin through gastric bypass surgery. This story is animated with telling detail and wry humor as perfectionist, bookish Amy and exuberant, nonconformist Alison play and scrap and share as sisters growing up in the ’70s. The second story, unfortunately, is not one the author seems well equipped to tell. She does recall herself as a picky eater and Alison as a voracious one, but she professes not to have realized that her sister was becoming fat or to have noticed until high school that Alison was a secret binge eater. As to why her sister ballooned into obesity as a teenager, Amy offers only her belief that Alison was “born with a biological imperative to gain weight.” The sisters’ lives took separate paths after high school, and outside of a glimpse of Alison coming into her own as an artist at the Rhode Island School of Design, her interior life is not revealed. The author gives lectures on the proper etiquette when confronting fat people, but no insights into one particular fat woman; similarly, she provides information on the gastric bypass procedure Alison chose to have in her late 20s, but nothing on her sister’s reasons for choosing it. After shedding nearly 200 pounds, Alison also doffs her dark, shapeless clothes and starts life over in form-fitting hot pinks and lime greens. It would be nice to hear what the flamboyant former fat girl has to say about her transformation, but readers won’t find it here.
Funny and affecting in parts, but on the whole disappointing.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7312-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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