Well organized but mostly frivolous and at times implausible.
An actress searches for her cat in Los Angeles.
After Cleo, Gershon’s beloved cat, was lost by her flaky assistant, she went to extreme lengths to find him. She skulked around West Hollywood in the early-morning hours with a can of tuna and a knife, meeting a kindly newspaper deliveryman along the way; she consulted Ellen Degeneres’ pet psychic; she got spit on by a Santeria priest during a live chicken sacrifice; and she attended workshops by scam-artist swamis. In the end, none of these desperate, expensive measures were necessary: Cleo was returned by someone who saw one of Gershon’s many “lost cat” posters. When Sonia, the pet psychic, first told her that “two spirits” would help her find Cleo, she immediately interpreted that to mean her uncle Jack and her friend Ted, both of whom had passed away recently. She took this prediction as evidence of the psychic’s reliability, but, later in the book, she wonders if the newspaper deliveryman was one of the spirits. Gershon insists on a sort of magical connection between her and the entire cat species; the stories she uses to support this assertion—e.g., being “invited” by a cat to a private cat party in rural Vermont—strain credulity. Gershon thoughtfully weaves the wacky cat-finding stories with stories about her past cats and significant people in her life. Though these anecdotes aren’t always fascinating, they are well-integrated into the story and give the thin premise of this book some needed heft.
Well organized but mostly frivolous and at times implausible.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40766-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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
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