An upbeat guide for navigating an inevitable path.
An amusing collection of commentaries about coming to terms with aging and change.
Logan (Designs in Patchwork, 1987) delivers an assortment of breezy observations of the ordinary that gradually reveal more difficult meaning-of-life questions. She begins her musings by literally studying her own navel. Her once perfectly formed “in-ey” that sat in the middle of a flat stomach, she says, is now an ugly “out-ey,” deformed by surgery and age: “it looks like a damn elephant trunk.” It is, as it turns out, just the last straw in a series of accumulating, irksome indignities, all of which lead her to the greater issue she’s facing: “What is my place at this age?” Logan is an articulate writer with a delightfully sharp wit that’s directed as often against herself as against society at large, and she writes as if engaged in conversation with a close friend. Each chapter begins with a memory or reflection that, at first, seems unrelated to the topic at hand: her childhood days at the swimming pool or her observation that her husband has had a mysterious, late-in-life growth spurt. Then her thoughts take deft turns, and the connections become obvious: her time in the sun led to two basal cell carcinomas, and she discovered that she’d become half an inch shorter than she was a year before. At times, she can be poignantly philosophical, as when she tries to remember the last time she made a call from a phone booth. Why is it, she asks, that we can remember all the firsts but not the lasts? It’s because we usually don’t know the lasts will be the lasts, she says; we don’t think them important enough to record them in our mental data banks. Her advice? Embrace the moment one is in. Logan’s work will resonate primarily with her contemporaries, as she captures a recognizable cultural past and offers inspiration for moving forward, but younger women who are willing to risk a peek into the future will also find it useful.
An upbeat guide for navigating an inevitable path.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9863812-4-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
