Riveting, with a powerful message for parents of teenaged girls.
An astonishingly revealing debut chronicles nine years of binge drinking in high school, college, and beyond.
Now 23 and sober, the author begins her story of alcohol abuse with her first drink, taken in the summer of 1994 when she was14. It’s an event she remembers vividly, as she does the first time her parents caught her drinking a year later and the first time she blacked out, another year after that. With alcohol, Zalickas discovers a way to end her feelings of shame, lack of self-confidence, even self-loathing. Since her drunken self becomes confident and brave, she drinks expressly for the purpose of getting drunk. Throughout high school, she has to hide her drinking, but at college—Syracuse University—she finds that it’s more than accepted; it’s expected. This is certainly true at the sorority she joins, nicknamed the Zeta Alcoholics and reputedly filled with fast-living and fun-loving girls. Zailckas confesses to spending more time in the bars around campus than at the gym, the library, or the dining hall. Out of college and working in Manhattan, she continues for a time to binge drink to quell her social anxieties, but after a blackout that ends with her waking up not knowing where she is or with whom, she is scared enough, or perhaps grown-up enough, to quit. While her account of college years rarely mentions the academic side, she clearly must have spent some fruitful time in class. Certainly the influence of her writing teacher, Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club, is evident here. Unlike Karr, however, Zailckas repeatedly inserts into her disturbing memoir facts about teenage drinking to demonstrate that her experience with booze is not unique (“the mean age of the first drink for girls is less than thirteen years old,” or “nearly three-fourths of sorority-house residents are binge drinkers”).
Riveting, with a powerful message for parents of teenaged girls.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03376-6
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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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