A treat for dog lovers and Cindy’s fans.
An upbeat account of moving on after loss, as the popular New York Post gossip columnist relates how the gift of a Yorkshire terrier brought her love, laughter, and a reason to get up each morning.
Married at 16 to comedian Joey Adams, the author was bereft when her much older husband died, in 1999, after a long illness. She had no children and no siblings, her mother was hospitalized, and though her many celebrity friends loyally rallied round, they were not enough. One of them, however, sent an unexpected gift that had unexpected consequences. A week after Joey’s death, TV producer Michael Viner paid $475 to have a Yorkshire terrier puppy chauffeured by limo from his trainer in Connecticut to Adams’s Park Avenue apartment. She had never had a dog, so she was unprepared for the demands, crises, and rewards of sharing her life with an animal. Short, breezy chapters relate Adams’s tussles with Jazzy, their travels together, and their adventures around town. In church, he started barking and then fled as the very bad soloist started singing. A shopping expedition ended abruptly when Jazzy pooped on the Gucci doorman’s shoes after he insisted that Adams remove her dog. Alongside cute tales of how Jazzy acquired his own personal trainer, designer outfits and collars, and a driver to chauffeur him to play dates, the author of course throws in plenty of celebrity encounters. On Christmas, distracted by Jazzy’s barks, she let the door slam shut behind her and wound up eating Big Macs with Imelda Marcos on the floor outside her apartment. Worried about her ailing pup, she spilled red wine all over herself while dining with Governor Pataki. After a year’s cohabitation, she observed that Jazzy had acquired some of Joey’s habits: he sat in her husband’s favorite chair, liked the thermostat kept high, and insisted she go to bed when he did.
A treat for dog lovers and Cindy’s fans.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-27307-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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