A volume of humorous hints that may be best suited as a gift for someone who’s tired of traditional advice books.
Adler, in her debut, offers a book of not-so-serious advice for living.
This collection of witty one- and two-liners is aimed at helping readers navigate the modern world. Readers should probably exercise a healthy amount of caution, however, in actually employing Auntie Jodi’s tips, lest they offend and alienate everyone they know. Adler divides the book into four sections, one for each season of the year, and offers up advice on a variety of social situations and predicaments. The book tends to assume a certain amount of affluence, or at least high social standing, on the part of readers; overall, Adler comes off as a Miss Manners for the Hollywood set. The book’s quick snippets of advice can easily be read in a single sitting or in short doses when one needs a quick laugh. The humor tends to be dry and sarcastic: “Those darling little children of yours down with the flu? Simply go on an impromptu vacay with your hubby…by the time you come back, the kiddies will be healthy as can be.” Other times, the hints mock traditional manners with suggestions such as, “Conversation at a lull while you are at a formal dinner? Convince your table mates to do ‘the wave’ whenever the help enters with another course.” The book covers everything from advice on how to arrange one’s shoes (“by length of time you can actually walk in them”) to the etiquette of changing one’s mind about attending an inauguration or coronation (“always send a personal note of regret—or, if need be, make a quick, last-minute phone call”). The collection does tend to grow stale when finished all at once, but read occasionally, it will elicit a smile or two.
A volume of humorous hints that may be best suited as a gift for someone who’s tired of traditional advice books.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 59
Publisher: Ginger Jam Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2014
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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