Single and suffering from the lack of a serious relationship, this 30-something author and TV personality enlisted the pre-feminist advice of the original Cosmo Girl. Her candid memoir details one woman’s search for love in the wired 21st century.
Though happy with her career, David (Bought, 2009, etc.) heard her biological clock ticking loudly and realized her life was devoid of eligible male companionship. After stumbling across a copy of Sex and the Single Girl, a romantic how-to book written in 1962 by Cosmopolitan former editor, Helen Gurley Brown, David embarked on “Gurley-afying” herself: “What if I tried every last suggestion she gave for becoming more feminine and meeting men?” With that approach in mind, the author jumped into redecorating her drab apartment, learning to cook and dressing more attractively. She strove to develop a “richer inner life” and worked on what were the “less-than ideal parts of myself.” In between her self-improvement episodes, David lays bare her life. The author analyzes her family travails, failed relationships and past substance-abuse problems and discusses how this messy combination laid the foundation for her current dearth of male companionship and lackluster personal life. David tried online dating, began cooking meals at home, traveled alone for fun and actually took a pottery class instead of just talking about it. “By pushing myself to follow Helen’s instructions for living,” she writes, “I’ve discovered just how simple it can be to change who I always thought I was.” David captures her escapades and social encounters with a snappy writing style and keen observation of the mating rituals of urban professionals approaching middle age. The author’s shtick is sure to appeal to women who are stymied by a similar situation, while others may find David’s romantic quest a bit tedious at times—but still worth a quick glance.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199604-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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