Like a long dinner date with that melodramatic, motor-mouthed best friend you can’t imagine life without.
Outspoken writer/performer Loh tells all about being an industrious minivan-driving mom during a particularly brutal midlife crisis: “the year I exploded into flames.”
At 42, living in Southern California and the mother of two young daughters, the author spent many nights fretting about how “unbelievably complicated” maternity had become in the modern world. During a woman’s 40-something years, she explains with wry candor, a molting process occurs whereby females cast off the wilting skins of their former selves and attempt to silence the “ceaseless drumbeat of domestic tedium.” But domestic issues reasserted their importance when older daughter Hannah reached kindergarten age and Loh realized that exclusive private institutions like Wonder Canyon or The Coleman School were completely beyond her means. Enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District was free, of course, but horrifying theories about the social stigma of public school swirled around the author as her devoted, tolerant musician husband Mike did his best to placate her fears. She contemplated placing Hannah in a Lutheran school, fraternized with a few of the moms, and soon playdates were materializing in abundance. Then came the devastating news of Hannah’s poor kindergarten testing results, which ended her chances for the Lutheran School. Loh experienced other traumas: After forgetting to tell her engineer to bleep out a casual use of the F word, she was unceremoniously fired from her public-radio program; then she gave the boot to her longtime feminist therapist. Never one to become unmoored by strife or circumstance, the author managed to land on her feet. She chronicles her panic-stricken neuroses in a relentlessly frenetic, blog-like narrative. It’s all about capitalized key words, hyperactive hysteria and…reestablishing a firm grip on motherhood.
Like a long dinner date with that melodramatic, motor-mouthed best friend you can’t imagine life without.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-609-60813-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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