A middle-aged, male Bridget Jones survives cancer and seeks his soul mate.
In Bankfarm’s memoir, he describes his life as a newly divorced banker who entered the world of online dating and was diagnosed with melanoma and successfully survived both ordeals.
When Bankfarm’s children were young adults, he and his wife realized they’d grown apart, and they divorced. He discovered online dating and approached it “like a twenty-five-year-old with a fifty-five-year-old’s budget, a dangerous combination.” The dating site connected him with a woman named Susan, but she was apprehensive after her own divorce and canceled their date. Finally meeting face to face, the two enjoyed being with each other and fell in love. Bankfarm visited the dermatologist about a spot on his hand that ended up being merely a bruise, but that “pimple” on his arm was malignant melanoma. The book explores his struggle with loneliness as much as his struggle with cancer. A man of faith, he consulted God, a psychic and others in an attempt to keep Sue in his life. At times, it’s disturbing to read of his overzealous efforts to woo her; Sue made it clear on several occasions she no longer wanted to see him. About a third of the way in, the author switches abruptly from the modern era to the past and shares his autobiography. Raised by an alcoholic father, he bought a car and left home as soon as possible. He entered college, partied too much and joined the Army Reserves. Afterward, he got a job in finance and advanced in the banking industry before returning to college. Bankfarm is a likable man who worked hard to get where he is today. He’s refreshingly honest about the screw-ups he’s made along the way, and his story is rarely dull. It’s touching to read some of the emotions he shares, at times wondering who will care for him and how his finances will fare. This is simple, straightforward prose from a man grateful to be alive.
A middle-aged, male Bridget Jones survives cancer and seeks his soul mate.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500472214
Page Count: 202
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
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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