Biting and funny, yet still tender and touching.
Nicely mingling wit and wisdom, television actress Burns crafts a memoir about being a daughter, becoming a mother and coming to terms with the gap between what you want and what you get.
The first-time author has created an unforgettable and ultimately forgiving portrait of her mother, a hard-working, talented, sometimes imperious and self-centered woman, widowed twice before age 50, who had an astonishing ability to make insensitive remarks and a regrettable inability to be close to her own children. Burns’s stories of growing up with and trying to connect to her distant mother will make readers both wince and smile, as will her portrait of herself as a raging, contempt-filled, bulimic teenager who takes cocaine and visits a psychiatrist. She follows up those pages with a deft comic account of clerking at Barneys while trying to become an actress. Eventually, Burns achieves some professional success and finds security in her second marriage. When her daughter Olive is born, she is determined to be the perfect mother and, of course, frets when she falls short or imagines that she is doing so. In an appealingly self-deprecatory style, with a keen eye for the trials and tribulations of modern urban motherhood, Burns relates anecdotes of her struggles to give her daughter the childhood that she never had. Just as observant of others’ foibles as she is of her own, the author provides cutting sketches of superior nannies and repulsive children in the park, of self-important fathers and impatient mothers. Parents will sympathize with her account of taking a sick child to a patronizing doctor. Raising a daughter gives her a new perspective and introduces tough questions: Just what are a mother’s responsibilities? How do you mother without smothering? Meanwhile, her own mother is aging; facing that reality raises its own concerns and questions as Burns keeps on trying for a relationship that eludes her.
Biting and funny, yet still tender and touching.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-86547-708-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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