Unremarkable showbiz fare—frothy, easy optimism from a TV performer.
The autobiography of 46-year-old TV reporter and anchor Kotb. She’s the one with the odd name perched next to Kathie Lee Gifford.
The author hails from the Oklahoma heartland, where her Egyptian parents arrived not long after their wedding. After traveling the world with her family, the author did the same in her nascent career as a journalist, though she first reported the news in local TV markets. She enjoyed her New Orleans gig and is inspired still by the spirit of the Big Easy. Then came Dateline NBC in 1998, where she relished assignments overseas—though she admits she was apprehensive amid gunfire, while seasoned colleague Jim Maceda was simply irritated by the racket. Since 2007, she has been the regular convivial sidekick on the fourth hour of The Today Show. Kotb’s narrative of recent years gains strength as she looks at her diagnosis of breast cancer, her husband’s infidelity and the divorce proceedings. Throughout the book, the author is relentlessly upbeat, and she relates her story with simple declarative sentences that occasionally enter cringe-worthy territory. Hair is a major problem, Mom’s baklava is the best and “Stone Phillips is—so—incredibly—hot. He just is.” Kotb is fond of Beyoncé, as well as “Matt, Al, Meredith, Ann, Natalie, the producers, and the crew.” Ready to date again, she notes that she loves her family and music, but dislikes neatness and haute couture.
Unremarkable showbiz fare—frothy, easy optimism from a TV performer.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8948-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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