A woman’s project to improve her marriage reveals she already has something good right in front of her.
A frank examination of one woman’s marriage and how she tried to improve it.
What makes a good marriage? After 10 years with her husband, Dan, New York Times Magazine contributing writer Weil decided to find out. She could no longer view their relationship “like the waves on the ocean—a fact of life, determined by the sandbars below, shaped by destiny and the universe, not by me.” The author wanted to create her own future and discover if her “good” relationship could be improved. Using self-help books, visits to therapists and marriage-education classes, Weil embarked on a yearlong journey with Dan to explore all the facets of their relationship, opening the doors on their present and past lives. In a narrative that is part memoir and part counseling book, the author candidly discusses their intimacy, religions, anger, money and views on monogamy and death. Humorous stories of Dan’s obsessions with cooking, flamenco guitar playing, surfing and other athletic pursuits contrast with the personal pain they both felt and expressed at the loss of their unborn son. In the end, Weil writes that her marriage is “good enough”—a marriage “characterized by its capacity to allow spouses to keep growing, its ability to give the partners involved the strength and bravery required to face the world.”
A woman’s project to improve her marriage reveals she already has something good right in front of her.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6822-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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