An agreeable visit with a chatty old friend.
With wry humor and good sense, the Emmy-winning Italian-American Mom of Everybody Loves Raymond offers advice, recipes, and reminiscences about personal and professional good and bad times.
This is not one of those linear memoirs that proceed from humble birth to exalted present. Instead, Roberts sidetracks here, detours there, but cumulatively offers up a lively if discursive account of her life. She accompanies each chapter with an appropriate recipe, usually an example of good Italian home cooking like her potato salad or lasagna. Beginning with an assessment of Marie, the character she plays in the hit comedy, Roberts revisits particular times, experiences, and relationships. Now in her 70s, expected when young to marry early and stay home raising the children, she admits to loving Marie because if things had turned out differently she too could have been such an overbearing mother. In other chapters, Roberts describes the unusual annual Christmas party she throws for the cast (“the greed party, where guests scheme to get the gifts they want”), recalls how she landed the part; and expresses the satisfaction she gets from still being able to work. Without self-pity she describes a lonely childhood: her taciturn, critical, and divorced mother had to work, and Doris was left with grandparents who regarded her as imposition. Only an uncle gave her a sense of worth that enabled Roberts to survive her first marriage (to a man she supported while he went to law school) and difficult early attempts to become an actress. Her second husband was the love of her life, she has one son and three grandchildren, and she happily details the joys of motherhood. She seasons everything with insights she picked up along the way: the value of perseverance, a positive attitude (think pink rather than angry red), and accepting who you are.
An agreeable visit with a chatty old friend.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31226-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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