Mildly entertaining anecdotes that might have made good cocktail party chat. Once compiled, they add up to a bit less than...
Older sister of a successful English entertainer spends a year in her sibling’s Los Angeles digs.
The author has the good fortune to be related to Julia Fordham, a singer/songwriter who’s actually making a living. Divorced with two grown children, 41-year-old Claire is at loose ends. Meanwhile, Julia’s just rattling around in her house in L.A. Voila: a book is born! Claire moves to the West Coast to find herself, and maybe some paying work as a journalist. Much of the story revolves around her fish-out-of-water experiences in the City of Angels, with its curious customs and flaky residents. The rest is a chronicle of Muttley, the dog Julia adopts, to whom Claire takes an instant dislike. Muttley eats her shoes. Muttley gets a trainer. Muttley becomes the scruffy little heart of the family. Meanwhile, Claire tries her hand at assisting on a movie set (hates it), accompanying her sister on tour in the Philippines (the bags are so heavy) and flying with Julia to do a showcase in New York City (she repeatedly calls the big-shot producer by the wrong name). When she can put aside her fascination with George Clooney, Claire also attempts to meet a man. With the help of various positive-thinking circles and supportive friends, she does find someone. Unfortunately, he ends up being a perfect L.A. stereotype: terribly charming, wonderfully clever, afraid to commit and fond of playing the field with women at least 15 years younger than Claire. When it comes to the “plus one” parts of the title, Claire spends more time attending baby showers of famous people’s children as her sister’s date than walking the red carpet at the Oscars.
Mildly entertaining anecdotes that might have made good cocktail party chat. Once compiled, they add up to a bit less than the sum of their parts.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7582-0918-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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