Self-indulgent and frankly de trop.
The relentlessly egoistical account of an American expat’s attempts at solo child-rearing in Paris.
Fashion designer Lobe (Paris Hangover, 2006) was 39 and living footloose in the “staggeringly magical” City of Lights when she suddenly became pregnant by a British divorcé. In pretentious, French-laced prose that irritates more than it charms, the author chronicles the changes she experienced, both inside and out, as she made her way into unexpected single motherhood. Her whirlwind relationship with “Mister Brit-o-Honey” ended after she announced her intent to keep their child. But her joy at finally being able to end the battle “to keep reed thin under the pressure of the discerning-to-the-point-of-ruthless mass of Parisians” knew no bounds. Yet the city of her dreams proved to be more hostile to her efforts to create a single-parent family than she ever expected. As splendid as Paris was, it also proved a horrifically expensive place to maintain the large, child-friendly home she envisioned for herself and her son. And no matter where she turned, it seemed as though everyone, from her pediatrician to the clerks at the stylish baby boutique she frequented, scornfully looked down upon her for daring to be a mother on her own. Most brutal of all were the judgments that people—including close friends—made regarding her choice to sleep with and breast-feed her infant. Eventually, Lobe decided to return to her hometown in Wisconsin to raise the son that had become the center of an increasingly myopic world. After eight years of living in France, she had become too Europeanized to reintegrate into Midwestern culture and too American to cope with French concepts of family. Most of Lobe’s Parisian adventures end midway in the book. From that point on, the narrative loses cohesion and becomes a never-ending series of lists that cover such topics as “new mom issues” and the pros and cons of staying stateside or going back to France. Relationships with the family she so effusively celebrates in the final pages become obscured into irrelevance.
Self-indulgent and frankly de trop.Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60532-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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