Delicious fun. Kitsy and the rest of the Mean Mommies are caricatures, but who cares?
Another wincingly funny memoir from Rouse (America’s Boy, 2006), who describes moving up from the white-trash Ozarks to white-shoe education.
Hired as director of publicity at Tate Academy (a real school whose actual name and location have been disguised), the author soon learned he was “the mommy handler…the bug guard on the institutional vehicle; I get whacked and splattered, take the hits, so everyone else riding in the car—the administration, the faculty, the staff, the students—stays clean and unharmed from annoying, stinging insects.” Queen Bee here is Katherine Isabelle Ludington, better known as “Kitsy” (a composite portrait), who acts as liaison for the parent and alumni groups whose work Rouse oversees, and usually completes. Whip-thin, sporting a helmeted bob and a Lilly Pulitzer pink outfit (her dog LulaBelle is dressed just like her), Kitsy pulls her Land Rover into the school’s carpool lane and summons Rouse to inform him that his Reunion theme and décor “are simply too boring.” The diabolical Kitsy—think Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada—hasn’t a clue how to treat people. She stiffs the waiters at her country club: “I’m quite certain the service staff is well compensated. A dollar here and a dollar there is just gauche.” She tells a chubby coffee-shop barista, “You know what’s funny? I’ve never met a thin April.” While Rouse recognizes Kitsy as shallow and cruel, the former outsider finds it difficult to stop longing to be a part of the “in” crowd. Will he develop some self-esteem and stand up to this matron from hell? Will he come out of the closet and introduce boyfriend Gary to his colleagues and the alumni? Will he protect the other children from the terrifying offspring of Kitsy and her Botoxed posse? Or will he succumb to the dark side of popularity and entitlement?
Delicious fun. Kitsy and the rest of the Mean Mommies are caricatures, but who cares?Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-38270-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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