Light, flippant and savvy.
California performance artist Lisick offers bright, funny takes on her square upbringing in Sunnyvale during the 1970s and 1980s, her adult life in San Francisco’s 1990s counterculture and beyond.
A weekly columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site, the author presents herself as “too weird to fit into the mainstream world, the one I came from . . . too normal for the fringe world I found later.” She highlights the contrast between normal childhood and freaked-out adulthood in her account of an annual ladies’ luncheon and Christmas gift exchange at which she appears first as an eager child waitress in 1976, then, in 1991, as a disheveled invitee with a hangover and bad hair bringing a poorly wrapped, last-minute gift. Lisick uses her uneasy stint as a homecoming princess and her appalling first date with a popular jock to create an entertaining glimpse of her high school years. Later, she’s at UC Santa Cruz stuffing $20 bills into her black bustier at a Catholic charities raffle because she needs money for an abortion. It’s darkly funny, and there’s more to come. After college, Lisick travels with an all-female punk-rock troupe named Sister Spit and explores her sexuality with a female construction worker named Trouble. Then, while living with her boyfriend in a San Francisco warehouse that’s flooded by broken sewer pipes, she is forced to move her possessions out in a beat-up shopping cart. When she eventually buys a house in Berkeley, it’s in a rundown, garbage-strewn neighborhood known as Brokely. Such personal disasters, small and large, are the stuff of these memoirs, providing her with the material for her sharp observations and self-deprecation. The final piece finds her a bemused new mother, coping with a drooling and crusty-headed baby boy who’s clad all wrong in pink and yellow. Exaggeration in the interest of a good story is no sin, and Lisick is above all an accomplished storyteller.
Light, flippant and savvy.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-077877-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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