A witty, eye-opening collection.
A New York City–based advertising executive candidly reflects on the tastes, habits, and lifestyles of his superrich Upper East Side acquaintances and their friends.
New York has always been a city known for socioeconomic extremes. However, as Kirshenbaum (Madboy: Beyond Mad Men: Tales from the Mad, Mad World of Advertising, 2011, etc.) suggests in this series of revealing essays, it has now become a place where the influence of the richest .01 percent “has spawned an era of excess, entitlement, grandiosity, and outright glitz not seen since the Roaring Twenties.” The author begins by examining the dynamics within overprivileged families, where fathers serve as little more than “invisible ATM[s],” parents often find themselves “smoking, popping and snorting” every drug imaginable, and nannies and chauffeurs double as surrogate parents for their employers’ delinquent children. Divorce is practically nonexistent, but for economic rather than emotional reasons. As one of Kirshenbaum’s informants observes, the only people who gain from marriage breakups are lawyers, who are nothing more than “undertakers for the living.” Dating among those who do divorce—and in particular, women—is an exercise in settling for one of three things: “sex, money or a warm body.” Friendship is often equally as devoid of feeling as romantic relationships. Kirshenbaum shows how wealthy people often surround themselves with individuals who “provide companionship and offer courtlike flattery” in return for financial gifts and favors. Where personal appearance is concerned, physical perfection isn’t merely a quest: it’s a way of life. The humor in this book is as understated as it is successful and derives largely from the way Kirshenbaum reports what he sees and hears in the world of the superrich and refrains from judging. Instead, he lets his informants—e.g., the divorced, wealthy businessman who shaves his body hair for his lovers and likens it to giving “consumers what they want”—reveal their foibles and foolishness themselves.
A witty, eye-opening collection.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0732-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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