One woman’s quest for the meaning of living beyond her means—a middling memoir.
A study in how compulsive acquisition can lead to untold loss.
Cardella exposes the self-destructive shopaholic tendencies that plagued her throughout early adulthood. Captivated at a young age by the allure of the fashion world depicted in the pages of Vogue, as well as her mother’s glamorous sense of style, the author writes that she first looked to fashion as a mode of self-expression. But soon after her mother’s death in 1989, that expression morphed into self-destructive behavior as Cardella began shopping compulsively, using the physical rush derived from buying clothes and accessories to fill a gaping emotional void. With the eerie intensity of a junkie getting a fix, the author recounts in encyclopedic detail garments worn on pivotal occasions, the arresting pleasure of shopping at exclusive boutiques—“Having a handbag placed in a special silk or flannel sack gave me a secret thrill, and seeing a simple white blouse disappear in a cloud of brightly colored tissue paper was as mesmerizing as a magic trick”—even the sensual appeal of closet hangers holding up her evening gowns: “There were hangers entwined in beautiful pale pink satin, looking as delicate as a ballerina’s toe shoes; hangers that came with their own pearl-tipped push pins with which the thinnest of spaghetti straps could be secured.” Not surprisingly, Cardella’s attempts to heal deep psychological wounds with surface balms led to a string of failed relationships and serious financial woes before she somehow righted the ship. While this confession admirably avoids self-help territory, it reads more like a self-indulgent exercise in retrospection than a serious inquiry into the causes of the author’s affliction.
One woman’s quest for the meaning of living beyond her means—a middling memoir.Pub Date: May 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-03560-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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