A fact-filled, tiresome memoir that leaves readers wanting more of some topics and far less of others.
A member of a celebrity family shares her life story.
In a narrative that spans her entire life, Watson—a “Certified Laughter Yoga Leader” who founded and owned the beloved Books & Co. in New York City, which closed in 1997—also includes long chapters on her parents’ childhoods. Her father was a dark, moody man who ran his house as he ran IBM; her mother was a model and dated in the Kennedy family. Rather than showing us her life, the author delivers a chronological compendium of facts, holding readers at a distance rather than permitting any intimate looks at her life. Many times, it seems like Watson is merely jotting down details on the page without regard for their relevance of how they are organized—e.g., “my father used to buy all sorts of cheeses and delighted in tasting them. He enjoyed some classical music and would listen to Tchaikovsky over and over.” The author briefly discusses her bouts with depression but fails to delve deep enough into her situation to warrant much sympathy. The author’s life will be interesting to those who like to read about rich, celebrity families who live in a world of their own, filled with nannies and debutante balls, summers spent on the coast of Maine, European travel (“my parents took me to Paris, and we luxuriated at the Ritz. We ran into Rose Kennedy…”), attendance at prestigious schools, etc. Watson would have done better to focus on the latter part of her life, when she ran Books & Co. and began to study meditation, hands-on healing, and laughter yoga. Any of these topics, coupled with more in-depth coverage of her battle with depression, would have made the book much more engaging.
A fact-filled, tiresome memoir that leaves readers wanting more of some topics and far less of others.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-933527-99-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
