Don't look to these unauthorized ``confessions'' by three sisters and former Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders for a history or exposÇ of the famed cheerleading corps. It tells almost nothing about the organization but is, instead, a shallow, sticky paean to overweening glamour and materialism. Suzette made the 36-woman squad in 1978, followed a year later by Stephanie (who, despite the triumvirate byline, narrates the ``story''). Both were retired by 1982. Third sister Sheri caught on as an alternate in 1985 but quit before the end of the season. Their mother, who dominates the first half of the book, was in hot pursuit of ``every little girl's dream,'' strictly coordinating her daughters' ``look,'' dating, and behavior: They were never to wear jeans or speak loudly. (``A low-class gutter sow'' is loud; a ``real lady...is as quiet...as a rose.'') Stephanie's most traumatic experience as a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader was, as she tells it, hearing of director Suzanne Mitchell's displeasure with her hairdo: ``I was very confused...I would look in the mirror for hours and cry. I hated myself.'' The payoff for ``the Rockettes of football'' certainly wasn't the $15 per game or even the personal appearances, TV movies, and game shows—for which the girls most often were not paid; it was, instead, a privilege just to wear the blue hot pants and bask in the Texas spotlight, to be treated ``like a geisha'' and end up ``being supported by rich men.'' Gushing descriptions of ``wholesome'' sexuality, coyote fur coats, and snakeskin boots; facile emotional crises and Fantasy Island pink/sunset romances with handsome oilmen; plus a lack of substantive information about the subject—all make for a relentlessly vacuous exercise. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06334-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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