A slight but reliably amusing look at masculine insecurity and confusion.
TV funnyman on marriage, family and BMW shopping.
Black (My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays that Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face, 2008, etc.), familiar to comedy fans from the sketch series The State and Stella and dozens of TV and movie appearances, presents an affecting memoir that unflinchingly details his failings as a romantic partner and father while curiously eliding his troubled childhood and professional career—aspects of the author’s life that might seem to be richer material for an autobiography. Black briefly describes his parents’ fractious relationship, his mother’s midlife embracing of lesbianism and the anxiety he felt for a younger sister with Down Syndrome, but these dramatic elements are largely ignored as Black details his callous behavior and sexual insecurities as a young man on the make and his current status as a conflicted husband and father. Readers hoping for glimpses behind the scenes of the alt-comedy boom will be disappointed, as Black barely mentions any specifics of his career as a writer and performer. However, he writes with real courage and feeling about his relationship with his wife, Martha, a moody and difficult partner with little patience for her husband’s immaturity and petulance. While Black is consistently funny and maintains his slightly detached, absurdist persona in his prose, there is authentic pain and moral confusion in his descriptions of marriage-counseling sessions, bitter arguments and threats of divorce. The author treads well-covered ground, but does so memorably and funnily.
A slight but reliably amusing look at masculine insecurity and confusion.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6785-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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