How to find pleasure and fault here and there about the city, delineated with a pleasingly naked candor.
From novelist Janowitz (Peyton Amberg, 2003, etc.): an uneven but not unappealing collection of short nonfiction written primarily for magazines.
The 78 pieces included here are all over the map—mostly the map of New York City, though the author takes a couple of side excursions, such as her trip to China to pick up her adopted daughter. Janowitz is ready to tackle almost any topic in her trademark prickly, deadpan manner; strangely, that very flatness gives these articles their life. Chronicling everyday travails is her strong suit. She can grouse with the best of them, noting indignantly that despite being tempted at every corner by a fabulous restaurant, “the modern New York woman is expected to have the same shape as that of a really tough villager who lives in a primitive place and spends the day hunting and gathering.” She can explain what it’s like to live with a dog that gets depressed after losing a fight, and she can make her ferret-fixation scarily palpable: “I thought I had to smell a ferret or I would go mad. It was even worse than the six months or so that I obsessed with eating sand.” Some of the pieces are too short, most notably a narrative about being “raped” by butterflies, intertwined with the story of a horrible traffic accident she’s involved in. That’s a piece that cries out for more detail. A surfeit of material bemoans Janowitz’s failures in dress, hairstyle, and comportment, and she works the jaded angle awfully hard. (On her mothering abilities: “It wasn’t that I didn’t love being with her—I did, for up to fifteen minutes at a time.”) The highlight here is an overarching portrait of her home borough, Brooklyn, so sensitive that it’s hard to believe she ever lived in Manhattan.
How to find pleasure and fault here and there about the city, delineated with a pleasingly naked candor.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32062-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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