A mildly funny book lacking any key takeaways or lessons—good for somebody looking for an easy read to kill time.
Chelsea Lately writer and producer McDonald (You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again, etc.) offers a collection of stories about her personal and professional lives.
McDonald strives to be a good parent, be financially responsible, spend time with other parents in Los Angeles and take advantage of the perks of being on the successful E! show—e.g., hanging out with celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, who is a friend of McDonald’s boss, Chelsea Handler. McDonald’s goals often clash and result in humorous encounters. Fortunately, the author does not take herself, or any of the said goals, too seriously. Handler’s pranks provide plenty of fodder for the book, while other material comes from McDonald’s husband, a cheap, stay-at-home mortgage broker, parents who live next door, and a sister who asked her for an egg. The author laughs at herself more than anyone else, and her humor is very similar to Handler’s. Those who read My Horizontal Life might find this book to be the less-funny version. However, while Handler’s stories are mostly about being a single woman, McDonald looks at the perils of being a working mother, which should resonate with a large portion of her readers. Many of the stories center around parenting mishaps, such as when McDonald accidentally took her children to a debauched party in Las Vegas or when she dressed a teddy bear as a third child to be allowed in the carpool lane after she dropped off her children at school.
A mildly funny book lacking any key takeaways or lessons—good for somebody looking for an easy read to kill time.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7222-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
