Though a well-worn theme, this particular merging of city and country is both sweet and savory.
A former drag queen swaps his pumps for work boots and life on a remote farm.
After retiring his alter ego in favor of an advertising career and a serious relationship, Kilmer-Purcell (Candy Everybody Wants, 2008, etc.) and his partner Brent, the “resident health and wellness expert” for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, became instantly enchanted with Sharon Springs, a charming, upstate New York town they discovered by accident during a yearly apple-picking excursion. Their adoration spawned the purchase of the historic Beekman Mansion, a million-dollar monstrosity built in 1802, replete with seven working fireplaces, a crypt and 60 acres of farmland. As both men were raised conservatively, the joint purchase of this “second home” was extravagant and indulgent, though Kilmer-Purcell admits to seeing his future “as promising as a roll of free drink tickets once was to me.” Aided by John, their trusty “co-farmer,” along with the camaraderie of friendly locals, the couple began raising turkeys, dairy goats, a Holstein bull calf, a vegetable garden and a goat’s-milk soap business, which exploded after a promotion on a Martha Stewart segment. A cavalcade of farming misadventures followed, all recounted in the author’s droll, deadpan delivery. (The countless Martha Stewart references, however, come across as arrogant.) Eventually, the pastoral joys of country life, and Brent’s unexpected layoff, took their toll on the couple’s nearly-ten-year relationship. An apprehensive visit from a New York Times reporter helped leaven the mood, before the pair considered selling the farm as Kilmer-Purcell lamented, “Had this all been one big folly?”
Though a well-worn theme, this particular merging of city and country is both sweet and savory.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-133698-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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