A zany and refreshing, if slightly overwhelming, take on soul-searching, writing, and midlife crises.
In this debut memoir, a woman turns her quest for something new into a comedic adventure.
“My journey,” Jorgensen writes in her foreword, “follows a route of randomness (though, if asked, I’ll totally deny that and say I planned it all out—with bullet point lists and highlighter pens).” The half-Mexican, half-Danish author describes herself as “hot-tempered, loud, and direct,” and these attributes come across clearly as she relates her childhood, working life, and a divorce that set her on a path of rediscovery in her late 30s. She details the journey of her “Little Mother” from Mexico to Canada, and her own youth spent in small towns throughout Canada’s Comox Valley: “If it had the word ‘river’ in its name or running though it, there’s a good chance I was there,” she writes. As an adult “Realty Lady,” she found herself trapped by her false salesperson persona, 80-hour-plus work weeks, and her marriage to a good man who just wasn’t right for her. She escaped that life by taking an intensive writing course at TheFilmSchool in Seattle and then trying her hand at dating, which resulted in a “HBUAB” (“handsome but unworthy American Boyfriend”) and, later, a continuing series of romantic and professional misadventures throughout the Pacific Northwest. Jorgensen’s prose style has the casual, carefree energy of many contemporary tell-all bloggers, and she often interjects self-deprecating parentheticals, bullet lists, and satirical strike-throughs into her story. Like many comedians, she turns the most upsetting moments of her life—including deaths, divorce, infidelity, and sexual abuse—into dark jokes. She exhaustively offers her opinions on such topics as popular culture, toothpaste, self-perception, and, of course, relationships, with witty wordplay and outlandish observations. The memoir’s manic pace and playful grammatical structures don’t feel particularly innovative or original, however, and it’s easy to get lost in its dense tangents. The author also lacks the precision and structure of the dark-comedy masters, such as David Sedaris. However, she’s consistently bold, shocking, and hilarious. Readers looking for a laugh won’t be disappointed, and those tired of heavier, more traditional memoirs about modern women’s struggles will be pleasantly surprised.
A zany and refreshing, if slightly overwhelming, take on soul-searching, writing, and midlife crises.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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