While Dickerson’s alternately amusing and painful anecdotes speak clearly to all, a lack of perspective on his time at...
This American Life contributor Dickerson recounts his time working for Hallmark in an amusing but disjointed debut memoir.
In his late 20s, the author, a crossword-puzzle writer and recovering evangelical Christian, landed what he hoped would be his dream job with the famous proprietor of sentiment. During his tenure with the company, Dickerson interacted with a surprisingly wide range of personalities and was passed back and forth between several different departments. Amid the amusing anecdotes of jokes fallen flat, petty passive-aggressive encounters and his bizarre methods of dealing with writer’s block, the author interlaces tales of other experiences, both life-altering and pedestrian (hiring a prostitute to touch her breasts, a shopping spree at The Gap). The stories are often provocative, fun to read and horribly familiar to those who have worked for large corporations, but Dickerson’s intent—both for the reader and himself—is unclear. In addition, he often piques the reader’s interest with leading phrases and language, and then fails to deliver the expected punch or glosses over profound revelations before moving on to a different topic. For example, after announcing that a potentially cancerous lump turned out to be merely an ingrown hair, Dickerson promptly segues into a prolonged story of further attempts to regain the approval of his boss through jokes that ultimately misfire horribly. His tendency to abruptly switch gears among topics like work, sex and religion with no framework to pull them together results in a haphazard stumble through a period in the author’s life.
While Dickerson’s alternately amusing and painful anecdotes speak clearly to all, a lack of perspective on his time at Hallmark may leave readers wandering as aimlessly as the author so often did at the greeting-card giant.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-881-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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