No psychic chicken soup here, but a chronology of life's roller coaster that may intrigue those on the same crooked track.
Told with grace and humor, a life story that gives new meaning to the word resilience, from an ambitious and successful woman whose travails once seemed unending.
Presently the editor of AARP's My Generation magazine, Carter boasts a career history most journalists can only fantasize about. Starting with Air and Water News, she moved on to Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Esquire (of which she became editorial director), then launched her own magazine, New York Woman. She had a thoughtful and loving husband, an apartment in Manhattan, and a house in upstate New York. But a car spinout when they were on vacation in Nova Scotia was followed by a series of disasters. A taxi accident fractured her jaw, knocked out most of her teeth, and shredded her lip; her face had to be reconstructed. In the middle of launching New York Woman, she discovered her husband was gay. Not long after that, the magazine was sold, her upstate house burned down, she underwent treatment with a psychotherapist, who ultimately recommended exorcism, and she began to suffer from asthma. Her mother developed a brain tumor, and a promising affair ended. Nevertheless, Carter met and married a man who appeared to be a soulmate. A week after their wedding and the celebration of New York Woman’s fifth anniversary, she was told the magazine would fold. Then came the diagnosis of malignant breast cancer requiring immediate surgery. Carter got through the surgery and the subsequent chemotherapy; ten years later, she has launched a new magazine and remains happily with her second husband. Chapters about her successes and woes are interspersed with sections on growing up Jewish in predominantly Christian Florida and attending college in Michigan.
No psychic chicken soup here, but a chronology of life's roller coaster that may intrigue those on the same crooked track.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6761-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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