A romantic romp from Santa Monica to Paris with loads of advice on how to live minimally and take risks in life and love.
The story of an advertising copywriter in California who found love in Paris and turned letter writing into art.
After a decade writing the sort of junk mail inserts that usually go directly from post box to garbage can, Canadian author MacLeod (co-author: The Dating Repair Kit: How to Have a Fabulous Love Life, 2007, etc.) was nearing burnout. At age 34, single and lonely, she was clinging to the middle management rung at a corporate advertising agency instead of pursing her dream of traveling and creating art. In a memoir that also serves as a self-help guide, she recounts how her journey out of cubicle-land began with a single question: “How much money does it take to quit your job?” Her answer proved deceptively simple: save or not spend $100 per day for a year. With her belongings whittled down to one suitcase and a small set of watercolors, she set off for Europe. At her first stop in Paris, she flirted with a butcher who looked like actor Daniel Craig. His English was as poor as her French, but of course, love speaks a universal language. Other stops on her tour included Edinburgh and Rome before she discovered how to finance more time with her James Bond in Paris. Inspired by the framed painted letters by the English artist Percy Kelly on the walls of her cousin's cottage in Yorkshire, she opened an online shop to sell personalized letters with drawings of her own travels. Several are included in the book and serve as inspiration for others longing for adventure. Borrowing a technique from her former advertising career, MacLeod provides a list of 100 tips to plot your own escape.
A romantic romp from Santa Monica to Paris with loads of advice on how to live minimally and take risks in life and love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8879-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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