Alternately appalling, aggravating and amusing.
Carrie Bradshaw meets Barbara Ehrenreich in this memoir about white-collar unemployment after the dot-com bubble burst.
Jen Lancaster was bratty but hardworking: She put in 60 hours a week at her corporate job and enjoyed blowing her paycheck on a Chicago penthouse and pricey shoes. But after a company merger, she was let go with one week’s salary as her severance pay. Lancaster’s layoff came in the midst of the 2001 economic downturn. At first, she was cushioned by her live-in beau’s earnings; in fact, Fletch and Jen went ahead and tied the knot, crassly reasoning that they would receive a lot of green wedding gifts. Then hubby got fired too, and the newlyweds spiraled downward. Eventually, their car was repossessed, and Fletch stopped taking his anti-depressants because he could no longer afford them. Lancaster kept up her spirits by volunteering at an animal shelter, and, of course, starting a blog. So it’s no surprise that she proves to be the type of writer who resorts to FREQUENT CAPS, italics and eye-rolling exclamations: “Are you trying to tell me that . . . I, the bride, am not allowed to JOIN THE REST OF MY WEDDING PARTY?” All the component parts of chick-lit are here: to-do lists (“Find a job! Lose weight”), transcriptions of instant-message conversations and email exchanges—indeed, the emails from the still-employed Jen to her friend Melissa, in which Jen repeatedly has to cancel social plans because of work commitments, could have come straight from the pages of Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002). All’s well that ends well, however. Jen snags a book contract and realizes that “[my] values have changed completely. . . . I could care less about Dior’s newest line of lip gloss.”
Alternately appalling, aggravating and amusing.Pub Date: March 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-451-21760-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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