Inga joins the leagues of essayists who make the mundane truly entertaining.
An irreverent debut collection of essays on the quotidian details of family life.
Earlier generations of readers had the homemaker humor of Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr, but the pieces in this collection offer a different kind of wit. Expanding on her ongoing newspaper column, the author works behind a thin veil of anonymity: While temporarily living in Sweden, she and her second husband “dubbed ourselves Inga and Olof.” The names stuck and provided her with the freedom to write about family and personal matters while also maintaining her privacy. Sometimes, though, it led to confusion; many fans, she writes, “must have been deflated (literally) to have come upon my Inga blog site expecting a Scandinavian hottie with…a power rack and instead found the memoirs of a middle-aged Swedish wannabe.” These short essays, arranged in 14 sections, cover Inga’s years as a single mom (including multiple “Disastrous Date All-Stars” and a large section titled “Kids, Part 1: A Question of Who Survived Whom”) as well as her later life (“The Perils of Spoiling the Granddog”). Overall, they’re full of solid writing and engaging wit. They aren’t exactly happy-housewife tales, however, and Inga is always honest about her limitations: “I never did learn knots, in spite of spending considerable time using the rabbit-goes-around-the-tree-and-through-the-hole method. (My rabbits always…got tangled up, and hung themselves).” There’s no doubt that Inga’s humor runs in the family; Olof’s note to a neighbor about a new computer mouse, for example, explains that “[o]ptical mice have no balls,” and recommends turning off the computer when installing them, as they “can experience ‘amputational shock’ when one of their members is removed.” Her sons, Rory (“Parental Terrorist in Training”) and Henry (“The X-Rated Three-year-old”), also provide plenty of additional fodder. For example, Inga and the adult Rory exchange emails after he reserves several unusual titles for his mother at the local library, including The Book of the Penis. Not to be outdone, Inga provides Rory with a thorough review of the book—along with suggestions for dinner-party conversation. This engaging essay shows the essence of Inga’s collection: clever and contemporary and even a little bit naughty.
Inga joins the leagues of essayists who make the mundane truly entertaining.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502303868
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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