A touching, delicious, compulsively readable account of life after love.
A former Forbes writer drolly details the emotional fallout after her fiancé admitted he was gay.
Not wanting to deceive her any longer, 36-year-old Aaron sat Blakeley down and tearfully admitted he’d been questioning his sexuality for the past two years. Initially amused but eventually shell-shocked, the author shifted into reconnaissance mode, wracking her frenzied brain to recall any signs of Aaron’s homosexuality that she may have missed. Blakeley grasped the brunt of her ex’s emotional and physical duplicity when she found anonymous personal-ad correspondence and gay-porn videos on his personal computer, a discovery which plunged her into “an eerie twilight world populated by those whom life had kicked in the teeth.” An attractive, newly single, 36-year-old woman in Manhattan, Blakeley was prone to crying on the shoulder of her gay friend Tyler and to fits of anger, insecurity and frustration. In attempts to recalibrate herself to single life, she hit the clubs, telling herself to enjoy and not overthink innocent, intermittent dalliances with guys like sensual, soft-voiced Rahil, sexy Pakistani Adi and a few ill-suited men from her profile on Match.com—all while stoking an apprehensive friendship with Aaron (“I love him, and I resent him”). The author was smart to steer clear of emotional ties until she met selfish, 30-something banker James, and all bets (and clothes) were off. Throughout the 320 melodramatic days chronicled in this amiable memoir, Blakeley remains a charming, witty narrator, squandering no opportunity to inject hip, biting sarcasm and hilarious insight into her adventures. Still, a bittersweet aftertaste lingers, reminding readers of “the crippling awareness that you could never know anyone…[that] the person you know best could be the person you know least.”
A touching, delicious, compulsively readable account of life after love.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3330-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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