A languid love potion best taken in limited doses.
Love eludes a hapless serial dater desperate to replicate the sparks he experienced as a wide-eyed youngster.
Not many young men would pack up and head for a far-flung honeymoon retreat in the Pacific thinking it might be a good place to find single women. The author attempted it twice. The first time he tagged along with his parents; the second, with another guy in tow. Kotkin plays his stunning ineptitude for laughs, but the joke wears thin as it becomes painfully obvious that there will be no epiphanies in the offing. Instead, the author delivers a string of banal accounts involving mismatched women mostly met online. None of these encounters approaches anything that might be considered wacky or zany (as the title of the book suggests). Among them: dating a deaf woman and discovering that communication was difficult; finding the vapid girl dull; being scared by the angry girl; feeling smothered by the clingy girl. Still, Kotkin persisted with blind dates, speed dates and non-dates. “The one thing I discovered about doing nothing when it came to finding love was that in return nothing happened,” he writes. “Nothing begot nothing. It kind of sucked.” Throughout, the author offers little in the way of self-reflection; instead, he resolved after each fruitless date to take yet another crack at it. The problem is never within, always without—even after one unsatisfied date blasted the author and his "vanilla stories."
A languid love potion best taken in limited doses.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-23571-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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