A joy for her many fans, old and new.
An exuberant celebration of life by America's favorite octogenarian sex guru.
Westheimer (Dr. Ruth's Guide for the Alzheimer's Caregiver, 2012, etc.) examines the basis for her resiliency and irrepressible joie de vivre despite the trauma of having been separated from her family at age 10 and the vicissitudes of age. As one of the last German Jewish children to escape the Holocaust, she was sent to live in a Swiss orphanage. Faced with the reality that her family had been killed and an ultimatum from the Swiss to leave the country, she went to Israel. She moved to France when the Sorbonne offered her an opportunity to pursue a higher education and then to the United States, where she earned a doctorate at Columbia University Teacher’s College. She has been married three times, with two ending in divorce and the third with the untimely death of her husband. Her secret for maintaining a joyful outlook on life is not in suppressing the negative but not in dwelling on it, either. Westheimer also writes about how she was grand marshal in New York City’s German-American Steuben Parade. After all, she quips, Hitler “committed suicide; meanwhile, I'm living life to the fullest.” More seriously, not to have accepted the invitation would have been like saying, “all Germans are inherently evil.” Although she has had phenomenal success on radio and TV, her role as Dr. Ruth came about by chance when she was in her 50s as an offshoot of successful guest appearances. The author prides herself most on her academic career. For many years, she taught graduate students at Princeton and Yale, and she currently teaches a course at Columbia Teacher’s College on family and media. Her warmth, wit, and wisdom shine through this lively account of a life well-lived.
A joy for her many fans, old and new.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4778-2960-8
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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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