A pleasant remembrance and an easygoing beach read.
A memoir about friendship, womanhood, and the idea that girls just want to have fun.
Debut author Preuss begins her story as a 20-something transplant from the East Coast in 1999 Los Angeles. There, she made friends with two co-workers, Nikki and Panooch, while waiting tables in the Century City neighborhood. In a series of sitcom-esque anecdotes, she tells of Panooch trying to teach her to walk in heels, of them capitalizing on their acting skills to con their way out of a traffic ticket, and of getting an awkward lap dance at her own bachelorette party. She married Rich, a television director, and they became fast friends with Chris and Cecilia, a couple she met through a substitute-teaching gig. The foursome were inseparable, and once, Chris even rescued Preuss from a snake in her living room. The narrative takes a turn, however, when Chris is diagnosed with cancer. As Preuss writes, “I certainly would rather tell you a story about when we went to Palm Springs and stayed in bed the whole time re-watching The Notebook five times after finding hot, sexy, deleted scenes on YouTube. But this is real life. Life isn’t full of all funny and happy stories.” In the aftermath of Chris’ diagnosis, the storytelling resonates most. Preuss strikes a nice balance between sentimentality and humor when discussing hospital visits and the absurdity of dying young. Soon, though, the memoir returns to Sex and the City–like territory. Into their 30s, Preuss and her friends continue to have a blast while going on thong-buying trips, having drinks, and giggling about men’s shortcomings. Overall, the author hits the mark with her lighthearted tone and self-deprecating asides, as in her explanation for a quick dabble in controlled substances: “I judge others for smoking weed, but I don’t hesitate in trying my son’s prescription pills. I have no defense other than I’m an ass.” That said, some sections seem rather flimsy, such as her account of seeing a driver accidentally knock a cyclist off his bike, which doesn’t add anything substantial to the book as whole.
A pleasant remembrance and an easygoing beach read.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Facetious
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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