An invigorating breath of fresh air.
The Emmy-winning star of Everybody Loves Raymond pens an engaging, effervescent story of her life.
Heaton’s humor occasionally lapses into strained wisecracking, and she repeats some details, but these are minor flaws in that rare thing—an upbeat memoir that doesn’t obsess about the rough times but instead is beguilingly sensible and wise about what’s important: the author’s family, faith, and craft. “I suffer from an early childhood malady that’s more common than you’ve been led to believe,” she begins. “I call it Way Too Normal and Happy Upbringing Syndrome.” Born and raised in a suburban Cleveland house filled with laughter, she belonged, like many of her neighbors, to a large, Catholic family. The local children played together, building snow forts in winter and picking berries along the rail track in summer, knowing that they could stay outside unsupervised until the streetlights came on. Her father was a sportswriter for The Cleveland Plain-Dealer; her mother, a homemaker who read widely, especially theology, died from an aneurysm when Heaton was 12. But the family held together, and Heaton now realizes that “bad breaks are not the worst things that can happen to you.” As she details her bumpy road to stardom—in New York she waited tables, proofread on the graveyard shift at Morgan Stanley, and washed her hair with shampoo samples handed out on the street—the actress also describes her religious journey from staunch Catholicism to staunch Presbyterianism. After moving to Los Angeles, she married, had four sons, and began to get the parts that matter—and pay. Though she loves acting, Heaton also loves her kids and admits it’s tough to raise them in present-day La-La Land: “Life was simpler in Cleveland. Parents were only expected to feed, clothe, house and educate their kids. Today you’re supposed to raise their self-esteem, give them piano and tae kwon do lessons, and teach them to download research for their kindergarten report.”
An invigorating breath of fresh air.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50871-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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