As oddly engrossing as repeated slow-motion viewings of an accident in an amusement park.
Replete with all the angst and adolescent passion requisite in a coming-of-age memoir, stand-up comedian Abrahams’s debut features a special grabber—the expectation of the impending end of days.
The author was reared as a Jehovah’s Witness, convinced that the world as we know it would soon end. The word from the Kingdom Halls where Witnesses gathered was that nonbelievers would perish any minute now in a fiery apocalypse, the Great War of Armageddon. Therefore, the author knew that worldly things like birthday celebrations, divorces, Smurfs, Halloween, yard sales and sex with strangers must be avoided in favor of regular Bible study and knocking on sinners’ doors. Sister Kyria learned that “Jesus was the head over man; man was the head over woman; and woman was the head over cooking peach cobbler and shutting up.” Somehow she became interested in matters not covered in Watchtower, Awake! or meetings at the Pawtucket Kingdom Hall. These included e-mail flirtations, weed, vodka and, in particular, sex. Her co-religionists soon became convinced that Abrahams, once tagged as gifted, had been taken by a demon spirit. Readers will be convinced it was the spirit of a comic performer, doubtless acquired at her early Theocratic Ministry School appearances as well as later competitive poetry slams. She was, naturally, “disfellowshipped” and thus deprived of perpetual life. Undoubtedly the cleverest lapsed Jehovah’s Witness yet, Abrahams offers a graphic, mordant, wickedly distaff take on the first two decades of her current life. It’s a confessional talking cure, melancholy as well as funny as it chronicles unharmonious family life, a short miserable marriage, foul boyfriends, booze and pervasive naïveté.
As oddly engrossing as repeated slow-motion viewings of an accident in an amusement park.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5684-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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