Feisty, funny, lightweight observations on life Southern-style.
Humorous essays from a sassy Southern gal raised in Alabama and now based in New York City.
Following her well-received book of short stories, American Housewife (2016), Ellis returns with a collection of witty essays filled with commentaries on a wide variety of aspects of her life. Though she pokes fun at the current tidying trend—sparked largely by organizing consultant and author Marie Kondo—that has people sorting through and discarding mountains of stuff, she discovers that she loves a clean house (“stepping into the Container Store for me is like stepping into a crack den”). Ellis shares her wisdom on staying happily married: “On his birthday, give him a singing card and shave above your knees….On Thanksgiving, dab a little Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup behind each ear. On Super Bowl Sunday, incorporate a giant “#1” foam finger into your lovemaking.” The author also discusses why she didn’t have children, the off-the-wall birthday parties her parents threw for her and her sister, what it’s like to fly coach while seated in the middle seat, and a host of other zany topics. Throughout, she provides commentary on what certain words and phrases mean in “Southern Lady Code”—e.g., a “vintage” book means “dog-eared, with ballpoint notes in the margins”; when discussing potential pregnancies, the phrase, “ ‘if it happens, it happens’ is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.” Whether she’s out shopping for a special party outfit, swiping a trench coat, or sharing some of her own mother’s witticisms, the author’s brand of humor is subtle and mostly unforced. Her one-liners—“sex is like a funny cat video: everyone thinks theirs is special, but we’ve all fallen off a couch”—and consistently droll remarks keep the amusement factor high and the pages turning.
Feisty, funny, lightweight observations on life Southern-style.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54389-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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