As might be expected from her Twitter account, Oxford has a gift for snarky one-liners and self-effacing humor, but her...
The latest book of comic personal essays by Twitter sensation Oxford (Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar, 2013) consists of verbal snapshots of embarrassing scenes from her childhood and later life.
The author, who grew up in western Canada and now lives in Los Angeles, made a name for herself with her tweets, most recently when she elicited millions of responses after inviting readers to respond with stories of sexual abuse attached to the hashtag #NotOkay. She writes seriously and with pride about these responses in the final essay in the volume. The other essays, arranged in no discernible order, relate occasionally amusing stories from Oxford’s anxiety-ridden life. In one, she begs her parents to allow her to go to summer camp and finds that it doesn’t live up to her fantasies. In another, she attends day camp (“middle-class, working parent prison”) and is alarmed to find herself on the edge of a tornado and in danger of being pelted by baseball-sized hail. This anecdote segues abruptly into an account of her fears that her children will be endangered by earthquakes in Southern California. The essays about the author’s adulthood are generally less fully developed than the childhood ones. In one odd one, she sends her husband off on a date with a guy he believes has been flirting with him at the gym and then interrupts them when she senses something serious is happening. Several of the essays retrace familiar territory, like one in which she looks forward to spending a couple weeks working while her husband and kids are in Canada and instead wastes her time stuffing her face with chips and watching TV.
As might be expected from her Twitter account, Oxford has a gift for snarky one-liners and self-effacing humor, but her stories are weakly structured and often drift to their ends without resolution.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-232277-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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