Some readers will find Jones’ sins unappealing, but many will be eager to see what other books come out of her—a guilty...
A funny, sexy memoir of a good girl gone momentarily very bad.
The title suggests yet another tale of addiction and redemption. Not quite. Jones (The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims, 2007) was an unhappily married executive at a Manhattan dot-com in the late 1990s, just past 30 and worrying about losing her edge too soon when she began taking guitar lessons from a “Jewish Vinnie Barbarino” for whom she felt an instant sexual attraction. Thus followed a couple of years in which she fell in deeper with her Virgil of badness and increasingly estranged from her oddly passive and incurious college-sweetheart husband. She began nightclubbing, putting together a band, taking cocaine and other drugs, and enjoying lots of the best sex of her life. This is not an especially profound book—the deepest thing in it is the epigraph from the Gnostic Bibles—and Jones skirts romantic-comedy cliché territory. She even has a gay male confidant who inspired the book’s title and delivers its biggest laugh-out-loud line (which may be worth the price of the book). However, Jones is a talented writer. The chapter explaining the book’s title is a masterpiece of comic writing, and Jones writes freshly and perceptively about love, lust and sex. Despite ample evidence of her real-life ability to lie, in her book, at least, she is starkly (and wittily) honest about her own faults while being generous toward the deeply flawed men in her life.
Some readers will find Jones’ sins unappealing, but many will be eager to see what other books come out of her—a guilty pleasure.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88697-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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 2026 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.
