Readers who fell in love with Rodriguez’s chronicle of life in Afghanistan will surely revel in this candid, intimate tale...
After being forced to flee Afghanistan, Rodriguez (co-author: Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, 2007) initially settled on an isolated mountaintop in Northern California. Here, she recounts her rocky readjustment to American life and eventual relocation to Mexico.
Back in the States, the once-confident, outgoing businesswoman found life in California unsettling, and she could not find suitable work or make friends. Eventually diagnosed with PTSD, the author received little substantive help for her problem. “I felt everything, all right,” she writes, “but wallowing in all that loss, grief, and loneliness left me exhausted, and even more depressed.” Always an adventure seeker and traveler, Rodriguez opted for a cruise to Mazatlan, Mexico, with a male friend. Beguiled by the sun, sand and ocean, she returned to the resort community and purchased a tiny bungalow. “So finally, I did what I should have done much, much earlier,” she writes. “I gave myself permission to leave.” The author packed her cat and her belongings into her car and headed south to her new home, where she slowly began rebuilding her life. She found a counselor who understood PTSD, and she surrounded herself with a vibrant group of new friends. Eventually, Rodriguez’s son relocated from the States and quickly married a local woman. Soon enough, the author became a grandmother. “And as horrified as some people my age might have been hearing news like that, I, on the other hand, was struck with wonder,” she writes. Business blossomed when Rodriguez opened a salon featuring pedicures and manicures. Realizing local girls needed help securing their futures, the author established Project Mariposa, which provides funds for girls to attend beauty school.
Readers who fell in love with Rodriguez’s chronicle of life in Afghanistan will surely revel in this candid, intimate tale of starting over in middle age in a new country.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1066-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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