A dour and narcissistic Seinfeldian exercise.
A Debbie Downer pontificates on the minutiae of her daily life.
Sunday Times Magazine contributor Leve apparently likes only two things: drinking coffee and talking on the phone. But even those things have their problems. She worries, for example, that the deli proprietor has customers to whom he pays more attention, or that he’ll be disappointed in her when he delivers her order. Though she loves talking on the phone to close friends, she also acknowledges that she’s much better over e-mail. Such is her essentially pleasureless existence, and in a series of short vignettes, she chronicles the things she hates—sunny Saturdays, dinner parties (in New York, though London ones are marginally better), most other parties, boyfriends, not having boyfriends, trying new things, surprises, giving gifts, wedding receptions and so on. She fantasizes about living alone in the middle of nowhere, so she doesn’t have to interact with people, and quips that the best kind of boyfriend might be on death row—guaranteed to be a bigger loser than she is. A rampant hypochondriac, she frets about hair loss, complains about her gynecologist and, like the rest of America, has problems with her health insurance. There are witty moments, particularly the stories about her oddball cast of friends and acquaintances, but there’s so much idle complaining to wade through that it’s difficult to focus on them. The New York neurotic has always been a source of comedy, but even Woody Allen and Tina Fey are happy some of the time, which keeps them likable.
A dour and narcissistic Seinfeldian exercise.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-186459-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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