Funny, touching essays on being a multifaceted woman with unique dreams, desires, and needs.
A TV and radio host acknowledges her need to be liked and tells how she’s worked hard to overcome this.
Comedian and journalist Salie wittily lays bare the highs and lows of her life (so far) and explains how much of what she’s done has been because she’s “an approval junkie.” When she told people the title of this book, some immediately understood what she was trying to do, while others looked at her askance. “At which point,” she writes, “I put down the cake I was frosting for them while simultaneously breastfeeding my daughter and doing squats and explained that I’m not ashamed about wanting approval. It kept my high school GPA very high. It’s kept my BMI somewhat low. It’s kept me on my toes when I wasn’t already wearing heels to elongate my legs.” Salie tells readers about falling in and out of love with her “wasband,” the struggles she’s had over the years with her weight, losing her virginity and telling her mother about it the next day, receiving hand job instructions from her gay brother, and a host of other intimate details about her personal life. The author talks about her mother’s illness and death, her difficulty in conceiving children as an older woman and the fertility treatments she endured, her various jobs on TV and radio, and falling in love with her new husband. Salie uses humor throughout her short essays, particularly in the beginning. As the book progresses, the moments she discusses are more tender than humorous, allowing readers a closer perspective on the author’s life. Salie’s children also make appearances in short narratives about miscarriages, the desire for a girl, and breast-feeding and breast pumps. She concludes with a sweet letter to her daughter, in which she urges her to “care a lot about winning your own approval—enough to stretch, appreciate, and occasionally embarrass yourself.”
Funny, touching essays on being a multifaceted woman with unique dreams, desires, and needs.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-41993-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
PROFILES
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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