The moments of genuine humor are few and far between, and the book mostly falls flat as a dull recounting of a former teen...
Former teen TV star attempts self-deprecating humor to tell PG-rated tales in this occasionally chuckle-worthy debut memoir.
Best known for playing everyone’s favorite girl-next-door crush, Topanga Lawrence, in the 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World, Fishel writes that she was “born with a serious case of the klutzes.” In chapters with titles like “The Poop Whisperer,” “Walk Much?” and “I Heart You With All My Fart,” the author regales readers with stories of embarrassing moments throughout her life, from falling off a Big Wheel bike as a child to tripping down a hill in front of Ben Affleck. Fishel loosely outlines her life with anecdotes about bad dates, catastrophic casting calls and cleaning up after her sick dog. The book is set equally in Fishel’s life as a teen star and her adult life, and devoted fans will be pleased to read about her personal life since Boy Meets World, which includes a marriage and a college degree. While there are a few tidbits from Fishel’s teenage years that die-hard ’90s TV fans might find juicy, most of the anecdotes are just familiar renditions of normal growing pains. The author writes with heavy-handed sarcasm that rarely inspires laughs and often addresses readers directly with hints of self-promotion—“Do you follow me on Twitter yet? Well, if you do, (1) bravo!” and (2) you may have figured out by now that I am obsessed with dogs.” Compared to other female celebrities who have successfully written comedic memoirs, Fishel has neither the skilled voice of Tina Fey nor the over-the-top adventures of Chelsea Handler. The best moments come when Fishel writes vulnerably but frankly about larger cultural topics such as body image or her teenage romance with Lance Bass, who later publicly came out as gay.
The moments of genuine humor are few and far between, and the book mostly falls flat as a dull recounting of a former teen celebrity’s unremarkable personal antics.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476760230
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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