Frank advice on how to live a productive, happy life despite certain odds, written in tribute to a “fearless, talented, and...
A collection of advice and life lessons for a dearly departed sibling.
The author’s younger sister, Kristina, committed suicide in 2007. Since then, YouTube comedian Akana has tried to make sense of her death and make her own life mean more by working hard to fulfill her dreams. "Kristina is the driving force behind everything I do. This book isn’t just inspired by her, it’s for her….This book is filled with the advice I would give her if she was still here,” writes the author, “the advice I want to reach out and give to young, lost, teen girls before it's too late." The easily digestible pieces are geared toward younger readers, but some older readers may benefit from the lessons regarding love, career, friendship, and other topics. Akana discusses the turmoil she went through immediately after her sister's death and how she began creating comedy videos, which eventually wound up on YouTube, where she became a huge success. She believed in her ability to create and hasn't stopped, regardless of the racial discrimination (she is Asian) she has encountered while trying to launch an acting career. Broken into four major areas—creativity; identity; money, work, and career; and relationships—much of what this self-made woman discusses is geared toward the entertainment/acting/social media venues with which she is familiar, but there are applications for any entrepreneur launching out into unknown territory. You have to belief in yourself, be the boss, "do what you need to do to get shit done." Akana is honest about her screw-ups at work, her eating disorder, and her poor choices in relationships. Refreshingly, the essays are not snarky, sarcastic, or filled with awkward attempts at humor; they read like conversations with someone who has experienced much and is willing to share her defeats and successes so others may avoid some of the pitfalls.
Frank advice on how to live a productive, happy life despite certain odds, written in tribute to a “fearless, talented, and bold” sister.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59493-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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