Fierce, candid reading.
A freelance travel journalist drops out of the rat race to spend a year visiting every national park in the U.S.
At 32, Pennington walked away from an unfulfilling job as an assistant to Los Angeles executives to embark on the wilderness tour of her dreams. “I had grown weary of spending my waking hours managing the lives of other, more successful people,” she writes. The author outfitted a minivan with a mattress and all the “creature comforts” she could cram inside and headed to her first stop in Joshua Tree National Park. There she encountered her first obstacles: worries over personal safety and her ability to handle the adventure she had chosen. Gradually, deeper anxieties involving the inner “feral child” who had felt abandoned by her parents began to emerge. Pennington believed that the natural world that had saved her from despair once before would help her find balance, but her obsession with pushing limits and the unexpected onset of the Covid-19 pandemic weeks after she started left her feeling more vulnerable than she expected. The journey—which took her all over the continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands—revealed that a relationship she thought would lead to marriage had been a union of incompatible opposites. Forced to confront the loneliness she feared, Pennington continued her travels to the end despite the mounting personal uncertainties, the risks posed by the pandemic, and the emotional health that made her feel like she could “no longer trust the narrative of [her] own mind.” The author’s unflinching honesty and the boldness of her inner and outer journeys are the two great strengths of a book that sometimes overreaches with too-florid natural descriptions. Despite this flaw, the memoir still succeeds in offering a moving portrait of a woman who came into her own by learning to let go.
Fierce, candid reading.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781542039710
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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 determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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