A romantic romp from Santa Monica to Paris with loads of advice on how to live minimally and take risks in life and love.
The story of an advertising copywriter in California who found love in Paris and turned letter writing into art.
After a decade writing the sort of junk mail inserts that usually go directly from post box to garbage can, Canadian author MacLeod (co-author: The Dating Repair Kit: How to Have a Fabulous Love Life, 2007, etc.) was nearing burnout. At age 34, single and lonely, she was clinging to the middle management rung at a corporate advertising agency instead of pursing her dream of traveling and creating art. In a memoir that also serves as a self-help guide, she recounts how her journey out of cubicle-land began with a single question: “How much money does it take to quit your job?” Her answer proved deceptively simple: save or not spend $100 per day for a year. With her belongings whittled down to one suitcase and a small set of watercolors, she set off for Europe. At her first stop in Paris, she flirted with a butcher who looked like actor Daniel Craig. His English was as poor as her French, but of course, love speaks a universal language. Other stops on her tour included Edinburgh and Rome before she discovered how to finance more time with her James Bond in Paris. Inspired by the framed painted letters by the English artist Percy Kelly on the walls of her cousin's cottage in Yorkshire, she opened an online shop to sell personalized letters with drawings of her own travels. Several are included in the book and serve as inspiration for others longing for adventure. Borrowing a technique from her former advertising career, MacLeod provides a list of 100 tips to plot your own escape.
A romantic romp from Santa Monica to Paris with loads of advice on how to live minimally and take risks in life and love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8879-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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