A wry account of the author’s quest to “pitch, plunder, recycle, and sell.”
How a self-identified “amateur hoarder” managed to rid her life of the overabundance of “stuff” that littered her home.
Schaub’s (Year of No Sugar, 2014) “Hell Room” was the largest room in her home—and also the source of her greatest embarrassment. In it, she kept everything from childhood drawings and college telephone records to “dried, hacked-up hairballs” and “rodent fragments.” Eager to rid herself of the burden the Hell Room represented, the author decided to take one year and perform a “clutter-ectomy.” However, she soon discovered that cleaning up decades of accumulated belongings was far more difficult than she could have imagined. Almost everything in the Hell Room, including the rodent fragments, had significance for her. Immediately, she began fearing that her choices would lead to regret. Even after she grudgingly admitted to herself that she might be a “hoarder in the making” and had thrown out or given away boxes and bags of old and/or unusable belongings, large piles of stuff remained. Despairing, she writes, “it felt as if the Hell Room were fighting back.” As she continued sorting through her collection, Schaub confronted some of her past selves, like the “hippie” and the “punk.” Slowly, she began to realize that she had been collecting things as a way of defining herself and fending off mortality; to let go of things was to let go of her past and who she had been. In the end, a much-chastened and more self-aware author managed to almost completely transform her Hell Room—and the rest of her home—into a place where free space became as valued as things had once been. Part memoir and part how-to guide, Schaub’s book casts a lightheartedly humorous light on the First World obsession with acquisition while showing readers that less truly can be more.
A wry account of the author’s quest to “pitch, plunder, recycle, and sell.”Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3355-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
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