Day is delightfully good company and has an interesting story to tell, but a richer work would have made more room for a...
Actress Day, best known for her “geek goddess” roles in such nerd-culture touchstones as the Web series The Guild and various Joss Whedon projects, recounts her unusual upbringing and the neuroses-strewn path that led to her obsessions with fantasy, science fiction, gaming, and online communities.
Diffidently home schooled by an eccentric, indulgent mother, the author and her brother were largely left to pursue their particular passions in an environment of social isolation. Day responded by immersing herself in the imaginative worlds of escapist genre fiction and video games, forging communities of like-minded introverts over the nascent World Wide Web—when she was not busy excelling at advanced mathematics and the violin, achievements that would land her in college at an age years younger than her peers, further exacerbating her social awkwardness. Day writes charmingly of her cluelessness and determination throughout her career, but there is a dark undercurrent to her drive to succeed, no matter how arbitrary the reward. From “leveling up” in an online game to maintaining a perfect (and perfectly useless, post-graduation) GPA, Day has always pursued her goals with a manic focus seemingly driven entirely by fear and panicky self-doubt. This compulsive nature led to addiction problems, interpersonal chaos, and extended periods of depression. The author’s feelings about her prominent role in the misogyny-drenched “Gamergate” scandal, which she reveals here with raw anger and hurt simmering beneath her breezy, kooky gal patter, suggest a painful ambivalence about the costs and rewards of the indoor, fantastical, virtual life—a fascinating thread that is too glancingly addressed throughout the book.
Day is delightfully good company and has an interesting story to tell, but a richer work would have made more room for a consideration of the darker aspects of geek culture.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8565-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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