Not at all profound, but middle-class brides ought to enjoy this nuptial memoir.
Hana Schank thought she was an independent woman. Then boyfriend Steven popped the question, and she morphed into a Bride.
Her moderately engaging debut describes the drama of planning a wedding. Hana spends days making cute cream-and-burgundy save-the-date cards; Steven, who’s color-blind, doesn’t fully appreciate them. Both Hana and Steven are Jewish, but they still have to figure out if they want a Jewish ceremony. After much angst over the dress, she opts for a Carolyn Bissett Kennedy sheath, rather than a Princess Di meringue. The couple wants to keep the wedding small, but their parents have guest lists miles long. So Hana and Steven, who live in New York, decide to hold the wedding at a remote inn in Vermont. They can invite all those fourth cousins, but surely the distance will deter all but their closest friends from actually attending. Some of the most amusing scenes here show bride, groom and both mamas struggling to nail down the details in Vermont. The florist, who claims she can procure only roses, has no flowers in her store, nor has she ever taken pictures of her work. Schank tries to add some heft to all the funny stories by mixing in a little cultural criticism. She recognizes that previous generations got by just fine with simpler celebrations, and she comments on the ratio of fairy-tale weddings to sky-high divorce rates. But she avoids the elephant in the room: How much did the Vermont B&B, the sheath and the save-the-date cards cost? Having obsessively wrung her hands over the extravagance of modern weddings, she could’ve shared the nitty-gritty of her own budget.
Not at all profound, but middle-class brides ought to enjoy this nuptial memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7736-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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