Entertaining and unexpectedly wise.
A blogger and nonfiction writer’s account of how she survived both new motherhood and her eccentric parents’ federal imprisonment for fraud.
Fedden was 36 years old and nine months pregnant when she had her first encounter with the federal agents who raided her parents’ luxurious South Florida home. She already knew that her wisecracking mother, Cecily, had once dabbled in drug dealing. Alongside her husband, Joel, a man who produced softcore pornography for cable TV, Cecily made “deals” that the pair never discussed. Despite the questionable nature of their business, arrest—and eventually, incarceration—was not what Fedden expected would happen to the parents whose friends included John Gotti’s nephew and the “hooker who claimed to have screwed Mohammed Atta the week before 9/11.” The author and her husband tried to build a quiet, relatively conventional life together, but inevitably, they became unwitting witnesses to the chaos that enveloped their parents’ lives. Cecily emptied out checking accounts to “stick it straight up [the] asses” of government officials bent on destroying her life. Not to be outdone, Joel cheated on her with women who were either younger or crazier than she was. Meanwhile, Fedden struggled through the rigors of early motherhood. Feeling “defective as a woman” and generally incompetent in comparison to her apparently “perfect” sister, she explored yoga and New Age teachings, which she ridiculed at first but grew to love. As her parents’ glittering world began to crumble, Fedden muddled her way to understanding that a “beautiful life” was less about finding perfection and more about accepting, and loving, flaws, especially in family members. At once disturbing and appealing, Fedden’s book charts a refreshing path through family dysfunction and personal redemption.
Entertaining and unexpectedly wise.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07528-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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