by Glynnis MacNicol ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2018
A funny, frank, and fearless memoir.
A successful journalist’s account of how she came to terms with being a single woman over 40.
Feisty and independent, MacNicol (co-editor: The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Women, 2014) had “taken herself from waitress to well-paid writer to business owner” in the span of 20 years. Now she was a glamorous Manhattanite with a wide circle of friends and access to famous and accomplished people. Yet as she neared 40, she realized she lacked two things society deemed necessary for female success: a man and a baby. In this sharp, intimate memoir, the author chronicles the eventful years following the 40th birthday that found her unattached and unsure about her path forward. Men walked in and out of her real and online lives as she traveled to offbeat locations for stories. While she still saw the women friends she had come to know during her 20s, responsibilities to partners, husbands, and children inevitably loosened ties. A close relationship to her married sister allowed her to witness firsthand the vagaries of matrimony and the rigors of parenting, while her housewife mother increasingly came to symbolize the life MacNicol “actively unwanted.” The contrast between the outcomes of her mother’s lifestyle and her own became especially clear as she witnessed her mother’s decline into dementia. The author became painfully aware that the choice to forge a life built around family was no safeguard to “being left alone” in the end and that, ultimately, “life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later.” Moving through the years without a ready-made blueprint was a struggle, but one that had been “terrifying, and then exhausting, and then delightful.” Unapologetic in her embrace of the ups and downs of the improvised solo life, MacNicol offers a refreshing view of the possibilities—and pitfalls—personal freedom can offer modern women.
A funny, frank, and fearless memoir.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6313-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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...
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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