Entertaining chick lit that should resonate with women striving to have it all.
A follow-up to An Italian Affair (2001), combining jaunts around the globe with a journey into the author’s psyche.
More magazine contributing editor Fraser has a problem: how to fit her independent, travel-loving self into a settled, loving relationship—i.e., how to find a husband. The author opens with her vacation in Oaxaca with the married professor who figured prominently in her earlier memoir. Then the 40-year-old Fraser set off for Naples, Samoa, Provence, Peru, Rwanda and Mexico. In between she participated in an Outward Bound venture in Canyonlands National Park, a college reunion in Connecticut, a meditation retreat in Marin County and tango lessons in Buenos Aires. Assignments writing about food enabled her to wine and dine in style, and her descriptions of meals are mouthwatering. Fraser is also perceptive about her surroundings and frank about her desires; her trials and tribulations with men are alternately funny and sad, and seemingly never-ending. The trip to Samoa provided a kind of turning point, when a sexual assault on the beach exposed her to her own vulnerability, shook her self-confidence and dampened her eagerness to travel. In the final chapters the author is 47 and still single, and she has built a home in the town in Mexico where she vacationed as a child. Even though she hasn’t found a husband, Fraser seems to have achieved a kind of balance that gives her story a calm and upbeat ending.
Entertaining chick lit that should resonate with women striving to have it all.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-45063-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
