A fine collection that illustrates the author’s credo that “change, if you embrace it, can be surprisingly rewarding.”
In Resich’s debut essay collection, turning 60 looks pretty good.
The Honolulu-based author wrote this debut collection of essays in 60 weeks, she writes, as a way of “finding” herself following an amicable divorce after 30-plus years of marriage. She draws upon six decades of her life, during which she earned a physics degree, worked for the United Nations and raised her children as a full-time housewife. A self-described “chatterbox,” Resich exalts in positive, lively confidences about retirement, memory loss, parents, children, gratitude and other topics, as she pursues her quest to live life with “confidence and resolve.” However, she’s no Pollyanna: “I’m hard-pressed to find anything graceful about aging,” she writes, but she knows that someday she’ll look back at today’s photos and think, “Boy, did I look good.” Some essays show how her grounded perspective helped her deal with cancers of the breast and tongue (and the resulting surgery, chemotherapy and recovery). Let friends help you, she urges: “I could never have envisioned that six hours of chemotherapy could be a fun (albeit unconventional) social time spent with a close friend.” Her advice? Never ignore something that you feel “isn’t right”; the doctor’s diagnosis that it’s “probably nothing,” she says, could easily turn into “something.” Other essays offer tidbits about her teenage years in Poland after World War II, when fashionable clothes were scarce, food had to be hunted, and kids from rich families were derided as “banana youth.” Overall, she writes with conversational grace in an easy-to-read, gossipy-girlfriend style. Her stories only rarely delve into the world beyond the personal, but this isn’t a serious limitation, as she’s someone readers will want to get to know.
A fine collection that illustrates the author’s credo that “change, if you embrace it, can be surprisingly rewarding.”Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490430720
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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