A heartwarming account, ripe for discussion in women’s book clubs and women’s studies classes.
An in-depth look at the enduring bond of friendship among a tightly knit group of middle-class Midwestern women born in the early 1960s.
Through his popular “Moving On” column in the Wall Street Journal, which focuses on transitions in women’s friendships, Zaslow (co-author: The Last Lecture, 2008) was introduced to the women featured here. The author briefly profiles all 11, but avoids an overcrowded portrait by focusing on four: strait-laced Marilyn, fun-loving Karla, outspoken Kelly and Sheila, whose death at 22 remains mysterious. The author spent time with them, looked at their photo albums, read their teenage notes and diaries, met their families and pored over the reply-all e-mails that have kept the group in close touch for the past decade. Zaslow also attended their annual reunion in 2007, an event he vividly recounts here. He records their happy reminiscences of high-school hijinks, their sometimes bittersweet recollections of adolescent misadventures, their connections with each other as their lives took separate paths and their continued warm support for each other as major events—marriages, births, divorces, deaths—impacted their lives. When breast cancer struck two of them in middle age, Zaslow shows the emotional help and encouragement they received from the others. Although his portrait of the group is mostly positive, he does not overlook the negative aspects of adolescent exclusivity, revealing how other classmates viewed them as a snobbish clique. Zaslow also reports briefly on research that has highlighted the difference between male bonding and female bonding, and the importance of friendship in the lives of women.
A heartwarming account, ripe for discussion in women’s book clubs and women’s studies classes.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40445-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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