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HOW TO LEAVE

Name: HOW TO LEAVE
Author: Erin Clune
ISBN: 978-1-63286-854-1

QUITTING THE CITY AND COPING WITH A NEW REALITY

by Erin Clune ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2018

Even readers with no intention of uprooting their lives will likely be amused by Clune's low-key and relatable adventures.

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A wry debut by a humorist and journalist that combines memoir with tongue-in-check self-help.

The book is set up as a guide for those who want to leave the coastal cities where they have established their careers for smaller and cheaper towns in mid-America. Clune (co-author: Sh*tty Mom for All Seasons: Half-@ssing It All Year Long, 2016, etc.) left New York City for her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, once she was married and had two young kids and, not coincidentally, was faced with the horrifying prospect of paying private school tuition for them. While the author’s insights into New York (“a people-watching paradise, with absorbing human dramas everywhere you look”) and the Midwest (which has “a preponderance of three things: snow, alcohol, and white people”) are more predictable than surprising, her self-deprecating persona has its charms. Her pleasure with the newfound benefits of suburban living (“in Wisconsin, we could do the laundry whenever it was dirty”) is evident, though some may find her taste for four-letter words less enchanting. Clune has a gift for quirky and thought-provoking overstatements (“nobody in America considers moving without, at some point, looking at Seattle”) and telling details: After she moved to Madison, she writes, “the number of weekly conversations we had about quilting went from zero to five.” The author divides the book into four sections, dedicated to “deciding to go,” “settling in,” “learning to adapt,” and “mastery.” Sandwiched among the snarky observations on food in the Midwest, where “the two main cooking seasons are grilling and Crock-Pot,” and rants about some of her pet peeves, which include Target and gratitude journals, are some useful bits of advice for those contemplating or engaged in a major move. “I do sincerely hope that before you move,” she writes, “you'll say good-bye to all of those baggy, ripped undies you've held on to for years 'just in case.’ ”

Even readers with no intention of uprooting their lives will likely be amused by Clune's low-key and relatable adventures.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63286-854-1

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

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)