A farcical tale of two people loaded with emotional baggage who still manage to make their relationship work.
An offbeat memoir of a quirky writer and his life with his fiancée.
Journalist Gurley describes himself at various times as “neurotic, obsessive-compulsive [and] infantile-arrested” in this strange memoir of the six-plus years leading to his engagement to his girlfriend/fiancée, Hilly. In a series of therapy sessions with a Dr. Selman, Gurley and Hilly expose their foibles to each other, from their first sexual encounters to their heavy drinking to their inability to handle money and debt. Fearful of becoming one of the “castrati”—Gurley’s interpretation of a married man—he does everything possible to avoid change, including late nights at the bar, chasing other women and “infantile rages and apocalyptic phobias.” Although he refers to himself as a “kind of postmodern troll, like one of the fiends that chase you in dreams,” Gurley does exhibit love and compassion toward Hilly, who is also portrayed with all her flaws. Despite his initial inability to commit, his anger and his self-absorption, Hilly remained a loyal partner, slowly wheedling away at Gurley’s will to remain single. At times amusing, Gurley’s stories may offend some readers with references to marriage as a “lifetime prison sentence, a ball and chain” and comments that blatantly objectify women as sex objects. Even taken as a parody of a couple in love, readers may shake their heads in unison with Dr. Selman, wondering why these two people stayed together through all their troubles.
A farcical tale of two people loaded with emotional baggage who still manage to make their relationship work.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6544-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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
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