A readable but minor contribution to the literature of problem drinking, without the depth of now-classics such as Caroline...
A memoir of drinking and its hold on all the other aspects of life.
In this set of joined essays, Coulter describes herself as “a grown, multi-degreed, loved, moneyed, professionally powerful woman.” For all that, she adds, she could not control her drinking, could not time it so that she wasn’t drinking all the time; she was, as the adage has it, powerless over the wine (and whatever else was on hand). Finally summoning up willpower, she quit in an evening she recalls mostly for its drab ordinariness: wait for the longing to hit, resist it, go to bed after “wandering and wanting and saying no.” As she writes, the author was fortunate to have a companion who, having enabled her drinking, enabled her sobriety as well; she was also fortunate to have the resources, psychic and otherwise, to be able to negotiate a path through a grown-up culture in which alcohol is everywhere. In a strong opening gambit, she describes being newly sober and working her way through a Whole Foods store choked with sale wines and through a business day in which “meeting” too often equals “drinks.” “Booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise,” she writes. There are some winning moments throughout the narrative, but too often the notes in Coulter’s book are repetitive, and the humor is more often forced than laugh-inspiring (“Croutons count as dinner. The starving people of the world will tell you croutons count”). On the plus side, the author deconstructs and often finds wanting the usual chipper here’s-how-to-quit advice, such as the thought that one shouldn’t drink in moments of sorrow, anxiety, loneliness, or other emotional stress, to which her knowingly world-weary answer is, “That’s funny.”
A readable but minor contribution to the literature of problem drinking, without the depth of now-classics such as Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28620-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
