An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud—though not altogether atypical—story of soul-searching abroad.
A comical travel memoir documenting a young woman’s attempt to find herself overseas.
After playwright and aspiring actress Shukert (Have You No Shame?: And Other Regrettable Stories, 2008) unsuccessfully attempted to gain entrance into New York's acting elite, she ventured to Europe with the promise of a fresh start. En route, an Austrian custom's official absentmindedly forgot to stamp her passport, essentially giving her free reign throughout the continent. The author’s charming romp across Europe led her on an array of misadventures throughout Austria, France and Switzerland, before she settled in Amsterdam, where she had it on not-so-good authority that an acting role awaited her. The role fell through, but Shukert's experience in Amsterdam's Red Light District and marijuana-filled coffee shops functioned as entry points for even greater mishaps involving a predictable cast of characters, locals and expatriates alike. While the author’s travels left a trail of one-night stands and failed relationships in her wake, the humor with which she recounts her experiences allows her work to transcend beyond the cliché of overseas-love-affairs-gone-awry. Shukert is at her best when she probes the depths of her own identity, both as a transplanted Nebraskan Jew and as a failed actress. The humor drives the narrative, but the rare poignant moments are intimate and well-appreciated. Though readers will root for the author, it becomes difficult as she continually traps herself in nets of her own making. Shukert acknowledges this shortcoming, admitting that “I had come to Europe to grow up, to fall in love, to become the kind of person that I wanted to be. But the person I was becoming was destroying the person that I already was.” This confliction of identity, though regularly masked behind cheap laughs, is what sets Shukert’s book above similar travel memoirs.
An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud—though not altogether atypical—story of soul-searching abroad.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-178235-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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