Frequently sharp and funny, but Cohen veers so often between comedy and despair that the effect is disorienting.
Uneven memoir by a sitcom writer who survived a series of personal tragedies.
Witty but depression-prone Cohen was thrilled to land a gig on the staff of Manhattan-based Spin City, although she eventually likened the job to “a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving…a group of people are crammed around a table, yelling over one another while eating to the point of discomfort.” Then, in quick succession, Cohen was fired from her dream job, her beloved mother died of cancer and her boyfriend dumped her. Grief manifested itself as a disfiguring facial rash so severe that she was sequestered in her apartment for nearly a year, unable to endure humidity and restricted to a bland diet. Suddenly, without explanation, the memoir moves on to show Cohen teaching spinning classes at her local gym and cautiously dating a TV reporter. Too much is left unexplained: Why was she fired, and why didn’t she pursue other television jobs? How was her medical condition resolved, and was it truly psychosomatic? And why, since her boyfriend was such a jerk, was she unable to move on some two years after the breakup? “I liked to consider myself a late bloomer, meaning someone who would eventually, however late, come into bloom,” Cohen writes. “Although when and if I would bloom remained a mystery.” Fortunately, she eventually did flower, tackling bike riding and tennis lessons with equal parts terror and bravado, and beginning a new career as a dating columnist. When, at 39, she finally met “William” (he requested a pseudonym), the two instantly connected and quickly became engaged. Although the relationship dissolved when William’s father died and he returned to California to work through his grief, this time Cohen retained her equilibrium.
Frequently sharp and funny, but Cohen veers so often between comedy and despair that the effect is disorienting.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0002-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
