Occasionally entertaining yet featherweight capers of an overweight woman trying to be cheery and carefree through her...
How one woman tackled some of the things on her mid-40s bucket list.
For fans of Lancaster’s (Twisted Sisters, 2014, etc.) particular brand of humor, she’s back in full swing with another memoir full of embarrassing moments, comments about her size and weight, and general midlife-crisis events triggered by realizing she has turned 46 and should create a list of things to accomplish before she dies. “As enamored as I am with the idea of listing and then finally scratching some long-standing itches, a part of this idea feels off,” she writes. “Essentially, I’m figuring out what I’d like to accomplish before I ‘kick the bucket,’ which means I’m definitely going to die. Not a fan.” From this point of view, Lancaster prepares her list, starting with a new playlist of music since she had been listening to the same bands for 30 years. The author meanders through a variety of escapades: learning to ride an adult tricycle, studying Italian, traveling to Italy, finding a new hobby, confronting her weight issues and compulsive eating habits, etc. She discusses her dogs, her husband, her friends, her dysfunctional body parts, a possible chance to meet and talk face to face with Martha Stewart, the challenge of doing juice cleanses—basically, just about anything that comes to mind she approaches with the same attitude: somewhat funny, quick, and lighthearted, reminiscent of sitcom humor but lacking any real substance or grit. Readers may laugh in the moment, but the punch line doesn’t carry over in a retelling. For pure entertainment of the lightest fluff, Lancaster is sure to please her many devoted readers; for those looking for words of wisdom on how a woman can navigate the 40-to-50 decade with dignity, while still having fun, they should search elsewhere for sustenance.
Occasionally entertaining yet featherweight capers of an overweight woman trying to be cheery and carefree through her middle-age years.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-47107-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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