A sexy, eloquent, well-written and -researched study/memoir.
An Atlantic contributing editor’s refreshingly bold and incisive account of how she came to celebrate her status as a single woman.
As a young woman, Bolick was in turmoil over the “dual contingencies” that govern female existence: “whom to marry and when it will happen.” She had always believed that she wanted marriage; yet even her earliest relationships revealed that while she enjoyed loving men, she was “most alive when alone.” Continually questioning how she wanted to live her life, she spent her early adulthood in and out of committed and noncommitted relationships. But it wasn’t until her 40th birthday that the still-single Bolick had the insight that would change her attitudes toward spinsterhood and show her that she “was now in possession of not only a future, but also a past.” In looking at the biographies of literary women she especially admired—most notably, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Neith Boyce and Maeve Brennan—she realized that all had lived full and vigorous lives that included loving across genders or within the context of open marriages. Moreover, she also discovered that these women were part of a larger history of women who had actively chosen to seek alternatives to traditional heterosexual/monogamous lifestyles. As Bolick traces her evolution into a woman unapologetic for her choices and unafraid of her own personal freedom, she also reclaims the derogatory term “spinster” for all females, married or not. For her, the word is “shorthand for holding on to that…which is independent and self-sufficient” rather than one that gestures toward prudery, coldness and repression. Ultimately, to be a spinster is to be part of a distinguished sisterhood of women boldly “living life on their own terms.”
A sexy, eloquent, well-written and -researched study/memoir.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34713-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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