A lighthearted travel book that encourages through example.
Travel blogger Holmes (I’ve Gotta Pack, 2011) encourages travelers to leave their stress behind in this motivational memoir.
Almost everyone wishes that they could travel more, but so few people are able to make it a priority. With the omnipresent stresses of work and family, it can be easy to put off desired travel unless someone gives you a friendly shove, as the author attempts to do here. “I’d love to give you a nudge and tell you a few tales about how travel has changed me,” writes Holmes in her introduction to this emphatically pro-vacation volume. About two years after quitting her ad agency job in 2003 and starting her own marketing company, Holmes embarked with a friend on a whirlwind tour of Paris before joining a hiking group that climbed 4,000 feet up Mont Blanc. Another time, she and three friends took a car on a 10-day odyssey through Spain and the Pyrenees. Holmes encourages Americans to travel within the United States as well, as she did during an adventure across California and Nevada as part of a group that she playfully refers to as “5 Hos and a Bro.” Nearly every page of the book features uncredited, full-color photographs of Holmes and her companions or of some of the sites that she describes. Holmes is an affable, if idiosyncratic, tour guide; for instance, she’s a big fan of cheeky acronyms, such as “BYOB” for “Be Your Own Boss” or “PWDS” for “People Who Don’t Suck.” Her stories are fun, though not outrageous, and involve such things as botched hotel reservations or munching on unusual foods. She mostly visits rather well-known places during her one- or two-week getaways, and by making clear how much fun she had and how much she cherishes her memories, she’ll instill a powerful desire in the hearts of readers to do similar things with their own friends and family members. Indeed, by the end of the first chapter, some readers may start planning excursions of their own.
A lighthearted travel book that encourages through example.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9846481-4-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Content Queens LLC
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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