Too much information, too little substance.
A Hollywood sitcom writer’s unabashed account of how she spent 10 years of her young adulthood traveling the world and having “sweet, sexy epic little vacationships” with foreign men.
Newman began traveling the world in her mid-20s. A painful breakup with her first love led her to board a plane to Europe, where she traveled all the way from Paris to Amsterdam. Two years later, she took a single-girl trip to Russia with her best friend. An encounter with a bartender led to the discovery of her libidinous alter ego, Kristen-Adjacent, and the start of her new life as “The Girl With Great International Romance Stories.” Newman then traveled to Spain, where she “tussled with a Barcelonan who…[wore] black panties,” and on to Canada, where she made out with a friend, then back home to obsess over the perfect man she never got but who invited her to chic parties all around the world. During hiatus from her work as a comedy writer, when all her other girlfriends were now “too married or too pregnant” to travel with her, she went alone to Argentina, where she took two lovers. One, a former priest, became an on-again, off-again flame and her reason for returning to Buenos Aires in subsequent years. On a trip to Brazil, she took up with two different men within a 24-hour period and had still more “vacationships” in Australia and Israel. Ambivalent about commitment to the point of neurosis but now adult enough to realize that she had all along “absolutely [been] looking for love,” the now late-30-something Newman finally settled down without regrets for her wild and wicked past. Though entertaining and, in its way, liberating, the book often crosses the line between uninhibited and overdone.
Too much information, too little substance.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3760-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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