Like a long dinner date with that melodramatic, motor-mouthed best friend you can’t imagine life without.
Outspoken writer/performer Loh tells all about being an industrious minivan-driving mom during a particularly brutal midlife crisis: “the year I exploded into flames.”
At 42, living in Southern California and the mother of two young daughters, the author spent many nights fretting about how “unbelievably complicated” maternity had become in the modern world. During a woman’s 40-something years, she explains with wry candor, a molting process occurs whereby females cast off the wilting skins of their former selves and attempt to silence the “ceaseless drumbeat of domestic tedium.” But domestic issues reasserted their importance when older daughter Hannah reached kindergarten age and Loh realized that exclusive private institutions like Wonder Canyon or The Coleman School were completely beyond her means. Enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District was free, of course, but horrifying theories about the social stigma of public school swirled around the author as her devoted, tolerant musician husband Mike did his best to placate her fears. She contemplated placing Hannah in a Lutheran school, fraternized with a few of the moms, and soon playdates were materializing in abundance. Then came the devastating news of Hannah’s poor kindergarten testing results, which ended her chances for the Lutheran School. Loh experienced other traumas: After forgetting to tell her engineer to bleep out a casual use of the F word, she was unceremoniously fired from her public-radio program; then she gave the boot to her longtime feminist therapist. Never one to become unmoored by strife or circumstance, the author managed to land on her feet. She chronicles her panic-stricken neuroses in a relentlessly frenetic, blog-like narrative. It’s all about capitalized key words, hyperactive hysteria and…reestablishing a firm grip on motherhood.
Like a long dinner date with that melodramatic, motor-mouthed best friend you can’t imagine life without.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-609-60813-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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