Though the volume contains a certain amount of filler, Massey’s unlikely insights into how women are shaped by the...
Odd but beguiling short essays about female celebrities toward whom the author has decidedly mixed feelings.
In her first book, essayist Massey collects pieces about Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Britney Spears, Courtney Love, Anna Nicole Smith, Lana Del Rey, and the Olsen twins, among others. These women—often the subjects of great scrutiny by celebrity magazines—prompt the author to ponder, with wit and keen self-reflection, what our feelings about them reveal about us. She muses, for example, about what she felt when she discovered she weighed less than Spears or why, when she was younger, she identified so strongly with Ryder, that “bottomless well of uncool and discomfort,” and now has begun to see that Paltrow may be more than the sum of her “tasteful but safe” self-presentation. Massey also thinks back on her fascination with Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, from their childhood appearances on Full House through their presence at New York University when she was attending the college, and she finds herself embracing the fact that “they have become the eccentric millionaires it never occurred to their adoring public they might become.” These tart, original essays are interspersed with others that are less humorous and more academic in nature—e.g., about the cult of Sylvia Plath and the role of sisterhood in The Virgin Suicides. Massey’s tendency to insert herself into the stories of her subjects is more successful when she’s talking about a pop or TV star than a well-regarded novelist: her attempt to compare an unfortunate romantic relationship to the plot of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays is misguided.
Though the volume contains a certain amount of filler, Massey’s unlikely insights into how women are shaped by the celebrities we idolize or despise are likely to prompt thought and discussion.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-6588-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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