Edgy, whimsical, and poignant essays about ordinary triumphs and travails.
A debut collection offers columns and op-ed pieces written for periodicals around the country.
Everyday pleasures, irritations, and quirks get center stage in Silverman’s essays. Whether she’s writing about the sublime joy of peanut butter, the inexplicable rudeness of neighbors who shovel their snow onto adjoining properties, the disappearance from the shelves of her favorite products, or the value of Post-it notes, her wry observations and musings ring with authenticity and familiarity. Not many people are so able to hold readers’ attention while discussing the perfection of yellow lined paper versus white. (Silverman does all her writing by hand.) Of the dreaded white pad, she declares: “It’s daunting, that blank surface, staring back at me. It is demanding and austere….‘Something you don’t like?’ it seems to suggest. ‘Well, learn to live with it.’ ” Then there’s her charming obsession with her old dictionary despite the unused new one sitting nearby: “Should I throw out the dictionary that I’ve used for twenty-five years, that has all but fallen apart? Or should I grant yet another stay of execution, and return it to its shelf?” In fact, a love of words, sentence structure, and books is evident throughout these carefully composed essays that maintain a comfortable, conversational tone. While most of her contemplations are light in nature, the conventional subjects—a shopping trip, the origin of a recipe, the tenacity of fallen leaves to return after they have been blown into a pile—are enhanced with humor and a delightful hint of snark. Still, the volume is best enjoyed in measured doses. Along the way, the author delivers some valuable words of wisdom. Especially tender are the sections that deal with the last few months of her mother’s life. Knowing she was dying, her mom wanted to visit her own mother’s grave. When she insisted on bending down to straighten the flowers they brought to lay at the gravesite, Silverman realized that this action was “the final gesture of a daughter saying goodbye to her mother.”
Edgy, whimsical, and poignant essays about ordinary triumphs and travails.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87233-299-7
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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