Yourgrau provides engaging company for most of that span, but the actual decluttering in the book might have taken less than...
A memoir about decluttering an apartment.
This isn’t a how-to book providing a step-by-step program to overcoming clutter, though Yourgrau (Wearing Dad’s Head, 1999, etc.) does chronicle his visit to Clutterers Anonymous, which the author didn’t find particularly helpful except to provide comparisons with those worse off than he is. Mainly, the book is the result of an intervention by the author’s girlfriend, whose success as a food critic contrasts sharply with the author’s self-deprecating lack of achievement. Her intervention inspired his writing project, which is to chronicle his clean-up project, though he discovers along the way that “doing my Project actually gets in the way of my decluttering!” Yourgrau shares histories of famous hoarders, psychological theories about clutter and its relationship with OCD and PTSD, and plenty of family memories, some of which seem to be distorted, about his ambiguous relationship with his late parents, memories that his penchant for clutter helps keep alive. “I hadn’t yet learned how to grieve properly,” he concludes after relating the death of his mother, one of the more moving sections of the book. Yet through much of the narrative, the author seems to be stalling, procrastinating, and distracting himself—all symptoms of the hoarder yet occasionally as frustrating to readers as they must have been to his girlfriend. Not until Page 80 does he announce, “Now for actual cleaning”—though, even then, not much gets cleaned too quickly. As the memoir progresses to the climactic dinner he will host and cook to share the livability of the apartment, where he was previously ashamed to admit visitors, he writes, “It had now been almost two years since my Project began.”
Yourgrau provides engaging company for most of that span, but the actual decluttering in the book might have taken less than a chapter.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24177-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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