All in all, a great ride with a homegrown American original.
Television host Ellerbee roams around the world and through her memories, one meal at a time.
Ellerbee (Girl Reporter Blows Lid Off Town, 2000, etc.) is known in the industry as a straight-shooter, and the voice that got her fired from NBC is back with a vengeance in the third volume of her memoirs. Warm and brisk, utterly conversational, way beyond sassy, Ellerbee is afire to share the lessons she’s picked up and the dishes she’s consumed in her first 60 years of making an impact. During her Texas childhood, she was convinced that her mother’s fudge pie played a large part in her popularity. In a newly opened Vietnam, she conceived a passion for Pho, and in Bolivia (her first foreign tour—as a teenage missionary), she learned to love street food. There is no real discernible pattern to these extended meditations, although there are themes. Recollections of her very young folk-singing days are followed by an account of cruising on Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, that then followed by a piece about feeding the hungry in inner-city Baltimore. A revelation about the surprising comforts of cruise ships is placed next to her account of reporting from Afghanistan—post-Taliban, pre-stability. Ellerbee’s injustice radar still has a hair-trigger—targets include the wealth of the church in the poorest of nations, and any society that seeks to restrict women in any way. Many of her essays are about the difficulties of growing older. Though the pieces can be sharp and sappy by turns, sometimes in the same paragraph, Ellerbee’s charisma and immediacy operate like a tractor, drawing the reader smack into the heart of how it is to be a cancer survivor, to lose your parents, to be alone—or to raft down the Colorado, watch your children marry, or whip up a Frito Pie.
All in all, a great ride with a homegrown American original.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15268-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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