Subjective memoir about film reviewer Haskell's emotions when her Film reviewer husband Andrew Sarris is felled by a near-fatal rare disease and becomes the sickest person ever seen in New York Hospital who lived. Many will admire Haskell's knack for wringing every emotive droplet from a vast thunderhead. One gives up early to her endless diversions or else finds oneself locked into an excruciating reading experience of walleyed pages that seem like nothing so much as reportorial space-filling Never mind that all the stuffing—the whole emotional webbing of her life, of her parental ties, her ties to her husband's family, her personal friendships (nobody seems left out), workplace friends, friends in the hospital—proves magnetized to her "love" theme. One cries GET ON WITH IT! But no—it's surrender to what she herself terms "neurotic" and sounds like free association, much of it in the jargon of a lapsed 70's feminist. In the end she admits that she's leaving Andy's version of his illness to himself—it's his material. And she is accustomed not only to living in her adored husband's shadow, but also in having his fabulous film-brain and knockout intuitive powers at her disposal. But here she's on her own, and recapturing square-handed signals of despair. Andy's illness is undiagnosable. Operation follows operation. A colostomy, ugh! Infections create big new illnesses. He's dying He's paranoid—for months! She can't connect with him. What's worse, her mother, who has never connected with Andy, can't connect with her. And Andy's mother is a mess, seemingly taking on his illness and suddenly coming down with something like Alzheimer's disease. The bills are colossal. For the first time in her childless marriage, Molly attempts to sort out the household finances and is staggered. Close friends die by the handful. And WHAT'S WRONG WITH ANDY? He's such a multilayered mystery, with so many bugs and breakdowns, that by the time he miraculously recovers the final diagnosis is Kafkaesque makeshift. Many strong clinical passages will carry this with most readers, who may well warm to the love theme too and find Haskell's method daring.
Pub Date: April 19, 1990
ISBN: 0595140408
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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