If readers can get past Cardiff’s irritating efforts to constantly demonstrate her own cleverness, they may find some...
A 20-something editor and writer's unapologetically snarky sex memoir that is “not about [her] sex life.”
In a book that is as disturbing as it is funny, Cardiff explores the absurd and at times bizarre events that have defined her journey to sexual experience. She begins with a description of recurring sexual nightmares she had as a child, which involved the singer Prince and a gigantic purple tricycle. Precocious but without any real knowledge of what sex was, she drew pictures of genital-eating piranhas and “Satan and the angel Gabriel sword-fighting with their huge penises” for the express purpose of getting kicked out of her catechism class. Carnal knowledge came to her unbidden, first through a porn film that she accidentally found on TV during a sleepover and then through homemade sex tapes that she discovered at a Thanksgiving family get-together. Cardiff grew into a graceless adolescence, where she fell for an older man with a penchant for seducing underage girls and eventually lost her virginity to a boy she got to know in the wake of a postponed orgy. In college, she pursued her sexual bliss with a guilt-ridden Mormon and experienced a moment of near-mystical enlightenment on the nature of dating and love in a Denver strip club. A move to New York allowed her to witness human sexuality in all its mayhem. In one essay, she describes an encounter with a man “lying on the sidewalk trying to orally pleasure a dead baby bird.”
If readers can get past Cardiff’s irritating efforts to constantly demonstrate her own cleverness, they may find some interesting observations about human sexual foibles, but not much else.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59240-786-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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