Further evidence that the world does not need another histrionic, self-important blog-turned-book.
A debut memoir billed as the lighthearted chronicle of a dedicated virgin’s dating adventures.
Pseudonymous blogger Broadway begins with her home-schooled Christian youth and continues through college and out into the working world. She describes her attempt to balance her relationship with Jesus and her desperate desire to find a husband in an off-putting, pretentious manner. The book is peppered with barely relevant quotes from revered intellectual brand names (e.g., Alain de Botton), and the author likes to bemoan her inability to find people on her intellectual level. That level doesn’t seem very lofty in the frequent and ridiculous quotes from Broadway’s journal. It would take a very determined and generous reader, for example, to find any relevance to the author’s marital or spiritual state in this entry from December 10, 2000: “It seems to me, suddenly, as if I had spent quite some time fixating on sandcastles. All around me, as a child, I saw other people enjoying them…Then one day I came out of my house, and there it was: my sandcastle. As I leaned closer to inspect the exactness of the exterior, however, a curious smell assailed my nostrils. I realized the castle wasn’t sand at all—but rather shit.” In this thicket of bad prose, it’s difficult to track the author’s many failed “relationships” with ludicrously nicknamed men (“the Winner,” “Poster Boy,” etc.), most of whom appear to be unaware that they’re in a relationship at all.
Further evidence that the world does not need another histrionic, self-important blog-turned-book.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51839-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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