Party-loving singles with an anxious interest in the weddings of friends may find a kindred soul here. Those looking for...
A debut memoir chronicling the author's feelings about the many weddings she has attended.
Doll is an established writer and editor who has been to more than 20 weddings since she was in diapers. Throughout the book, a bewildering mass of anecdotes, incidents, musings and emotions whirls past, blurring together and leaving little lasting effect. The author is always attentive to the details of clothing, decorations and environments, but her powers of description are limited, with a heavy reliance on lists and clichéd phrases. One of the most engaging parts of the book is the story of her parents' courtship and marriage, and her lively mother may be the most vivid and sympathetic portrait. Doll raises all the persistent difficult questions about how to pick the right person, how to make it work, how much work is a reasonable amount, but most of her advice is predictable. She covers the usual anxieties of the single person whose friends are all getting married, as well as many questions about the place of marriage in modern life, but Doll skims the surface of them, as she does her own emotions. Her preoccupation with weddings seems to come down to lingering childhood fantasies, a love of parties and a niggling sense of missing out, despite her overall satisfaction with single life. As the narrative progresses, Doll's lighthearted charm fades as she repeatedly laughs off and rationalizes her own volatile and damaging drunken behavior. In one rock-bottom episode, she combines material display with titillating dysfunction by informing us of the exact cost of the shoes she flung down the street as her friends tried to subdue her.
Party-loving singles with an anxious interest in the weddings of friends may find a kindred soul here. Those looking for emotional depth or original insights may not.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59463-198-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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