Practical but dispiriting social spadework.
Washington Flyer contributing editor and “clueless romantic” Machacek spends a year looking for true love.
After a fizzled long-distance relationship followed by miserable blind dates, the frustrated 33-year-old became proactive, beginning a 12-month “experiment” using a variety of matchmaking outlets to find her Mr. Right. The opening statistics are discouraging—a 2005 survey of Internet users: “55% of singles reported no active interest in seeking a romantic partner”—yet Machacek plodded on, posting profiles on sites like Match.com, eHarmony, IJL (“It’s Just Lunch”) and The Onion Personals. The expectations were lofty, but the in-person dates disappointed in both looks and personality as much as the rapid-fire exchanges at speed dating and the four weeks of blind dating, which failed to turn up anyone with which the author shared romantic chemistry. Machacek appealed to family, friends and co-workers for support, especially sage gay pal Kenneth, who’s “equal parts crotchety old man and charming queen.” With one service charging more than $1,000, the author learned the costly side of romance alongside the quagmires of dating outside her area code and coming clean to potential love interests about her experiment. Whether these men failed to entice her due to “stylistic blunders,” lack of physical attraction or spark, the author repeatedly found herself “caught in a melee of not-quite-rights.” Some of the calamity is humorous, and there’s fun to be had in the chase itself, but her “superficial judgments” on the parade of men who abruptly came and went eventually doomed her serial dating project. To her credit, the author acquiesces to hard-won personal revelations about her shallowness and sabotaging tendencies to prejudge others. Machacek’s most rational conclusion, however, concerns her refusal to settle for less—to “not choose anyone in order to keep myself open to someone who is right for me.”
Practical but dispiriting social spadework.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-496-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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