Lackluster.
A debut offering tedious recollections of childhood.
Choi has strung together 13 essays about growing up in a tight-knit Korean-American family. The title piece is a meandering account of how Choi spent her 27th birthday: alone. All of her friends bailed on her, and her parents forgot to call. Then Choi moves to “Animals,” a meditation about her childhood and adolescent love of teddy bears, squishy lobsters and other stuffed animals. “Spelling B” is a light-hearted examination of her parents’ obsession with academic excellence: As Choi’s mother said, the parents’ job was to provide for their kids, and the kids’ job was to go to Harvard. Characteristically, this essay ends on a confusing note. Having recounted her less-than-triumphant performance in a school spelling bee, Choi—who holds an MFA from Columbia—describes her nightly study of “exotic and challenging words. My favorite was ytterbium. I wondered what it meant.” (Does she imagine that this sounds profound?) Throughout, the author focuses on common battles between girls and their mothers, arguments over clothes and diet. Unfortunately, in her hands, these fights are little more than trite set pieces. The titles of the essays are exceedingly cutesy—the reflection about the onset of Choi’s menses is called “Period Piece.” Still, there are a few redeeming moments. Choi’s meditation about her mother’s breast cancer is tender, and her discussion of the pressure she feels to get married is laugh-out-loud funny. Choi uses dialogue to good effect, though even that faint praise must be tempered, as her rendition of her mother’s broken English—“You make Mommy so tire!”—quickly gets old.
Lackluster.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-113222-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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