Likely to score well with readers hungry for 1980s-style self-help ruminations. But those who want something with more...
An affair holds the key to renewal, in an unsatisfying follow-up to Hannah’s Gift (2002).
Previously, the best-selling Housden told the harrowing story of her three-year-old daughter’s death. Now, in a sequel of sorts, she chronicles the next season in her own journey as mother, wife and woman. After Hannah died, Housden and her husband, Claude, had another child, but their marriage was on the rocks. Claude stopped wearing his wedding ring, and Housden suspected he’d had a fling while on a ten-day business trip. Craving time alone, she takes a retreat at a hermitage. “I could not shake the feeling,” she recalls, “that I was here to meet someone.” That someone is Roger, a dashing English author, with whom Housden has an affair. The affair “gently” opens her heart, “petal by petal,” and she returns home to tell Claude she wants a divorce. The two determine that he should take primary custody—hence the subtitle’s “different kind of mother.” Eventually, Housden marries Roger, and together they settle in as the non-custodial caregivers of her three children. Housden fears she’ll be judged—what kind of mother willingly gives up custody of her kids? But the memoir’s problems don’t stem from Housden’s presentation of her parenting. The few sections devoted to the mundanities of parenting are engaging. Indeed, one might wish Housden had spent more time detailing the nitty-gritty of non-custodial parenting. The trouble comes instead from Housden’s description of her affair and divorce. Her blasé acceptance of adultery, together with the suggestion that her affair was the transformative event that allowed her to discover her true self, rankles. The tone is self-congratulatory, and Housden’s efforts at profundity fall flat: “Safe. . . was someone else’s idea of a life, not mine.”
Likely to score well with readers hungry for 1980s-style self-help ruminations. But those who want something with more bite—and self-criticism—will have to look elsewhere.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5416-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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