by Iris Bahr ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2007
Intermittently chuckle-worthy tale that never lives up to its once-in-a-lifetime title.
Semi-virginal Israeli army-intelligence vet picks up her backpack and heads east, drawn by the prospect of travel and potential deflowering.
The first time Bahr tried to have sex, it was with a Moroccan paratrooper she met while on guard duty at her Israeli army base. Even though he was strangely gorgeous (the other soldiers on base being intelligence types: “very brilliant and very very ugly”) and quite into the idea, it was a (partially completed) disaster. So, two years later, 20-year-old Bahr—a transplanted Bronx girl fresh out of the military and years away from TV semi-stardom, on Curb Your Enthusiasm—gets ready for an Asian backpacking jaunt, fully determined to get away from her clingy mom, the military and her virginity. Things start off poorly for the author, whose travel buddy abandons her in Thailand, leaving her to aggressively market herself to other backpacking groups in order to not travel alone. A stint in the jungle with a pair of drugged-up Brits goes poorly (the cute one is more interested in lying to Thai hookers about wanting to marry them to get free sex), while adventures in Vietnam with an overly friendly girl also named Iris go little better. Things reach a nadir when Bahr ends up in the Himalayas flirting simultaneously with a couple of best friends and snapping in jealousy at the other women in their ad-hoc party. Bahr has a flair for the self-deprecating wisecrack, a trick that keeps this quick memoir moving. But often she’s so busy indulging in competition with backpacker girls, and ignoring men who are interested in her while chasing after those who aren’t, that the actual traveling gets short shrift. If romantic melodrama was all she wanted, she could have stayed in Israel.
Intermittently chuckle-worthy tale that never lives up to its once-in-a-lifetime title.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-234-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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