Though the oddly unfulfilled premise remains a bungle, Wentworth charms her way to safety with her endearing reflections.
Facing her 50th birthday, Wentworth (Ali in Wonderland, 2012, etc.) embarks on an inspirational quest to self-betterment as she reflects on teachable moments from her life.
Positive reinforcement can be a hard thing to come by, especially, as the actress and comedian realized, when on the verge of middle age. At 49, Wentworth was feeling blue and overcome by lassitude. Needing a change, she turned to an unexpected source of wisdom: Twitter. By following the aphoristic teachings of 140-word inspirational tweets, the author began a project to cast off her discontent and remake a “dynamic, sleeker, and turbocharged” self. However, Wentworth’s plan to use Twitter as a guide to spiritual enlightenment disappears as quickly as it is introduced. Nowhere in her anti–self-help musings about marriage, wellness, and parenting does she return to this premise. The only connection to her Twitter concept is her insertion of oddly hashtagged phrases and Twitter handles in lieu of certain surnames. She haphazardly includes inspirational wisdom gleaned from her anecdotes about a former nemesis–turned-friend, the comedy of errors that was her invitation to give a commencement speech, and a cameraman that sullied her powder room. Thankfully, Wentworth is funny. She gracefully and elegantly bares embarrassing stories from her past and hilariously conveys the challenges of her marriage to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos and of raising their two children—e.g., when her daughter desperately wanted a guinea pig for her birthday, which, accordingly to Wentworth, is nothing more than a glorified rodent. With wit, the author may inspire others to simply enjoy the moment and not let themselves get in the way.
Though the oddly unfulfilled premise remains a bungle, Wentworth charms her way to safety with her endearing reflections.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-223849-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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