A lively read undermined by an unbridled hissy fit.
Feisty former New Yorker chronicles her second career as a Texas lavender farmer.
Enamored of her life as a high-powered journalist with a penchant for designer shoes, Ralston figured that moving to Austin was enough to satisfy future husband Robb’s desire to escape Manhattan’s glitz and return to his native Texas. But then Robb, a globetrotting photographer for National Geographic, started to find Austin too urban and began lobbying for a home in the country; the 33-year-old author, eager to have a baby, agreed to another move in return for his promise that they’d start a family. The couple eventually bought land in the rural, politically conservative community of Blanco. There, inspired by a visit to the lavender fields of Provence, they started the first commercial lavender farm in Texas while raising two sons in a renovated barn. Irritatingly, nearly half the book is comprised of the author’s whining about the failings of Blanco compared to New York. Readers will grow weary of her nonstop rant about the lack of art, culture, cappuccino and couture fashion in a milieu where camouflage-clad, deer-stalking hunters reigned supreme. Ecstatic when she was finally able to secure a daily subscription to the New York Times, the author obsessed about losing lucrative freelance assignments with periodicals that counted. A fascinating saga about the history of lavender and its cultivation in the United States fights valiantly to emerge from the underbrush of Ralston’s emphasis on the negatives in her life. By the time she gets around to celebrating her achievements as a pioneering lavender farmer and entrepreneur, the reader’s patience has worn thin. Still, the book is likely to find an audience among upscale career-change seekers, aspiring small-business owners and those grappling with work, family and “quality of life” concerns.
A lively read undermined by an unbridled hissy fit.Pub Date: May 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2795-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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