A readable but minor contribution to the literature of problem drinking, without the depth of now-classics such as Caroline...
A memoir of drinking and its hold on all the other aspects of life.
In this set of joined essays, Coulter describes herself as “a grown, multi-degreed, loved, moneyed, professionally powerful woman.” For all that, she adds, she could not control her drinking, could not time it so that she wasn’t drinking all the time; she was, as the adage has it, powerless over the wine (and whatever else was on hand). Finally summoning up willpower, she quit in an evening she recalls mostly for its drab ordinariness: wait for the longing to hit, resist it, go to bed after “wandering and wanting and saying no.” As she writes, the author was fortunate to have a companion who, having enabled her drinking, enabled her sobriety as well; she was also fortunate to have the resources, psychic and otherwise, to be able to negotiate a path through a grown-up culture in which alcohol is everywhere. In a strong opening gambit, she describes being newly sober and working her way through a Whole Foods store choked with sale wines and through a business day in which “meeting” too often equals “drinks.” “Booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise,” she writes. There are some winning moments throughout the narrative, but too often the notes in Coulter’s book are repetitive, and the humor is more often forced than laugh-inspiring (“Croutons count as dinner. The starving people of the world will tell you croutons count”). On the plus side, the author deconstructs and often finds wanting the usual chipper here’s-how-to-quit advice, such as the thought that one shouldn’t drink in moments of sorrow, anxiety, loneliness, or other emotional stress, to which her knowingly world-weary answer is, “That’s funny.”
A readable but minor contribution to the literature of problem drinking, without the depth of now-classics such as Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28620-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2018
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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