The moments of genuine humor are few and far between, and the book mostly falls flat as a dull recounting of a former teen...
Former teen TV star attempts self-deprecating humor to tell PG-rated tales in this occasionally chuckle-worthy debut memoir.
Best known for playing everyone’s favorite girl-next-door crush, Topanga Lawrence, in the 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World, Fishel writes that she was “born with a serious case of the klutzes.” In chapters with titles like “The Poop Whisperer,” “Walk Much?” and “I Heart You With All My Fart,” the author regales readers with stories of embarrassing moments throughout her life, from falling off a Big Wheel bike as a child to tripping down a hill in front of Ben Affleck. Fishel loosely outlines her life with anecdotes about bad dates, catastrophic casting calls and cleaning up after her sick dog. The book is set equally in Fishel’s life as a teen star and her adult life, and devoted fans will be pleased to read about her personal life since Boy Meets World, which includes a marriage and a college degree. While there are a few tidbits from Fishel’s teenage years that die-hard ’90s TV fans might find juicy, most of the anecdotes are just familiar renditions of normal growing pains. The author writes with heavy-handed sarcasm that rarely inspires laughs and often addresses readers directly with hints of self-promotion—“Do you follow me on Twitter yet? Well, if you do, (1) bravo!” and (2) you may have figured out by now that I am obsessed with dogs.” Compared to other female celebrities who have successfully written comedic memoirs, Fishel has neither the skilled voice of Tina Fey nor the over-the-top adventures of Chelsea Handler. The best moments come when Fishel writes vulnerably but frankly about larger cultural topics such as body image or her teenage romance with Lance Bass, who later publicly came out as gay.
The moments of genuine humor are few and far between, and the book mostly falls flat as a dull recounting of a former teen celebrity’s unremarkable personal antics.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476760230
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
