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 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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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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