Embarrassing.
Carrie Bradshaw meets the AARP in this mediocre meta-memoir.
Shortly before her 50th birthday, music journalist Ganahl was asked to write a column for the San Francisco Chronicle about being single and middle-aged. Here, we read about the dates that she wrote about for the paper; snippets of the actual column; some of the emails she received in response to the column; about the dates she decided not to chronicle in the Chronicle. In short, this is a tedious, repetitive and sophomoric book. Ganahl’s advanced age—advanced, that is, for a swinging singleton tell-all—seems only to have given her wrinkles. What the years haven’t imparted is wisdom. To wit her on-again off-again affair with a jazz musician named Lenny. Over and over, he dallies with her, and still Ganahl keeps going back for more; the penultimate page finds her pathetically leaving him asleep in a hotel as she slinks off alone to her 50th birthday party. It’s hard to know if she’s being serious or satirical when she exclaims things like, “But he shared his feelings with me! It was like a miracle. At this moment, I can almost believe this is the beginning of a new chapter for us. One that might actually lead to love.” One of the few threads that makes this book bearable is Ganahl’s depiction of her charming 20-something daughter, Erin, who is a paragon of filial devotion. (At the same time, Erin’s astute common-sense underscores her mother’s lack of insight.) Ganahl also tells some truly funny stories about horrible dates: There’s the lawyer from Louisiana who flew to California to meet Ganahl after reading her column, only to get plastered halfway through their date, and the environmental activist who confesses love to Ganahl while under the influence of Ecstasy. But readers will cringe a lot more than they’ll chuckle.
Embarrassing.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03824-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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