An exhaustive and exhausting autobiography of Weiner's life to date.
A bestselling author reveals everything about her life.
Novelist Weiner (Who Do You Love, 2015, etc.) gives readers an in-depth look into her life in these nonfiction essays, the subjects of which have provided much of the fodder for her popular books. Going as far back as when her grandparents met, the author provides an overly detailed timeline of her life. For those who want to know how and when Weiner began writing; what grade school and high school were like for an overweight introvert; why her mother came out as a lesbian and the effect that had on the author; her college life, including the classes she took; her ambitions during and after college; the boyfriends she had and the lovesickness she felt when they left her; how she felt about being a mother and how returning to work when her first daughter was very young affected her; the author’s thoughts on food and weight gain and loss; how her books became so successful; and a host of other minutiae, look no further. The essays are honest, sometimes funny, and sometimes emotional, and they help to show what life can be like for a woman and/or a Jewish woman, but there's so much packed into the book that it becomes overwhelming. Weiner's ability to recall physical details about her 8-year-old classmates or the books she read starting at age 4 may seem impressive, but it's those same details that eventually bog readers down. For Weiner’s many fans, the book will answer the question of “where does she find her writing material?” Readers of her novels and those who like knowing the intimate, personal lives of popular celebrities will find plenty to absorb in this fat volume.
An exhaustive and exhausting autobiography of Weiner's life to date.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2340-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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