A lighthearted read appropriate for summertime.
Krasnow continues to focus on intimate relationships and personal growth, this time through the lens of the summer camp experience.
A self-described “summer camp lifer,” the author, whose books include The Secret Lives of Wives and Surrendering to Motherhood, has penned an extended love letter to the lakeside camp of her youth. Throughout, she advocates for the positive, life-changing effects of camp life for all children. Starting at the age of 8, Krasnow attended northern Wisconsin’s Camp Agawak for two months and continued for the next 10 summers as a camper and counselor. “Camp…is where it all started for me,” writes the author, continuing, “all that is very adventurous, very sentimental, very brave, and very naughty about who I am today was birthed and nurtured there.” Later, the mother of four sons accompanied her boys to their summer camp to work as staff. In yet a third camp run, she returned to Agawak in her 60s to spend summers as a staff member, reviving the camp literary magazine. Krasnow organizes the chapters by traits purportedly cultivated by camp—independence, ambition, versatility, responsibility, and so on—and intersperses her recollections with those of some lifelong camp friends about how the experiences engender these qualities. While the author does fall into repetition and mawkishness as she recounts her beloved activities, songs, and traditions, most readers will be convinced of the value of summer camp in building confidence and character—especially for iGen kids. Free of technology and parental micromanagement yet “seasoned by full-throttle summers that teach us a bounty of skills,” writes the author, “we become resourceful and adventurous adults who feel like we can do just about anything—no matter our age.” Not everyone will relate to the intensity of Krasnow’s immersion in camp life, but her argument for the importance of a sacred childhood space will resonate with many.
A lighthearted read appropriate for summertime.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3226-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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