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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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