A must-read for yogis (or would-be yogis) who enjoy a little snarkiness with their savasana
DiVello takes readers on her voyage of self-discovery as she explores the worlds of banking and yoga in her debut memoir.
Recent college graduate DiVello, reeling from a breakup, gets laid off from her first job. The same day, she tries her first yoga class, and is thrilled when she doesn’t think about her ex or her joblessness for its duration. Fast-forward several years, and DiVello has her personal life squared away—she’s engaged to a funny and understanding man named Nunnally—but she still uses yoga as a refuge from her new, spiritually numbing job in financial services public relations. Her boss, “Vomiting Vicky” (so named after a drunken incident at a meeting), and her offensive colleague, “The Meat,” drive her to look into a year-long training program to become a yoga instructor. As DiVello contemplates leaving her lucrative but spiritually trying professional career, she also plans her wedding. She later realizes that yogis can be just as vindictive and spiteful as financial services workers—just in more bizarre ways. DiVello’s fresh, sympathetic voice and humor often mask her underlying alienation. While she provides hilarious, evocative descriptions of her classmates—including a woman who wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the word “Vagina”—she considers herself a fraud for not giving up meat, caffeine or alcohol, even as she discovers that others are bigger poseurs. This memoir reads like the best of chick lit, but with far deeper self-reflection—and the notable difference that DiVello’s personal life is the one thing in her life that is in order.
A must-read for yogis (or would-be yogis) who enjoy a little snarkiness with their savasanaPub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Worcester Square Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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