Tart and scary.
An ongoing blog about the author’s experience with breast cancer is transformed here into a deeply personal, often darkly funny memoir.
Wisenberg (Creative Writing/Northwestern Univ.; Holocaust Girls, 2002, etc.) takes the reader from January 2007, when she was diagnosed, through surgery, chemotherapy and recovery, closing with a postscript in June 2008. This is not just a survival tale. The witty, opinionated author, a brusque intellectual and a self-described “Costumed Activist,” freely shares her likes and, more often, her dislikes, both serious and petty. She has harsh words for the indifference of some in the medical establishment and for corporate-sponsored pink-ribbon campaigns that fail to sponsor adequate research into the environmental causes of cancer. She also scorns women who wear stiletto heels. Readers who want to know more, or to view photographs of the mammary-shaped baked goods at her Farewell to My Left Breast Party, can go to the Cancer Bitch blog. Wisenberg doesn’t scant the disconcerting physical details about drains, scars and chemo, and she’s equally open about her fear, suffering and depression. Rather than her breast, surprisingly, it’s her hair loss she obsesses about. Eschewing wigs and turbans, she has a friend paint swirling designs and “US out of Iraq” in henna on her scalp, an act that says a lot about who she is and how she sees herself. Mostly though, she writes about carrying on her daily life during a stressful time: lecturing, reading, taking yoga classes, dining out with her husband, visiting friends, observing the Jewish holidays. The entry titled “What Is Mine,” which names peoples, animals, places and things the author likes and identifies with, seems a tad self-indulgent. Not so “An Accounting,” which illuminates and moves as Wisenberg sums up what she has learned from her experience.
Tart and scary.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58729-802-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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