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THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF A SINGLE MOM

The literary equivalent of frozen yogurt—neither rich nor healthy, and not particularly filling.

Chronicle of a stay-at-home mom's failed marriage and salacious experiments with online dating.

First-time Canadian author Moore garnered attention for her personal blog IAmDivorcedNotDead.com, which led to this book on the same subject. In her frank, conversational voice, the author reveals the intimate details she shared with her husband, Robert, whose infidelity she partly blames on her losing interest in sex with him. After years of feeling numb, Moore felt a strong attraction to her married acupuncturist, with whom she undertook a yearlong affair. In the middle of his divorce, Moore separated from Robert, only to discover that her acupuncturist had been cheating on her and would, within weeks, be the father of his other mistress' new baby. Moore, along with two girlfriends whose marriages were on the rocks, threw herself into online dating and casual encounters. Her ensuing adventures included a visit to a swingers' club, explicit e-mail exchanges with, among others, a man who demands that she reports all of her sexual escapades (she consents), and many experiments with dominant lovers. She did not enter a committed relationship with any of them, choosing instead to bask in her newfound sexual liberation. The title, however, isn't technically true, since Moore is upfront about her conquests and pleasurable exploits, as well as, for the bulk of the book's action, still legally married. Her extreme honesty is engaging, but the seemingly endless stream of sexual details eventually blunts both the reader's attention and appetite to continue reading.

The literary equivalent of frozen yogurt—neither rich nor healthy, and not particularly filling.

Pub Date: March 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-58005-386-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Seal Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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