Good-natured vapidity.
Self-described Jewish American Princess Cook temporarily relocated to Nagoya, Japan, where her husband worked as a teacher while she navigated the quotidian ins and outs of expat life.
Following her splashy wedding, the author regretfully traded her Beverly Hills existence—replete with regular visits to Neiman Marcus, her longtime hair stylist and manicurist and constant contact with her childhood best friend and family—for far less luxurious conditions in Asia. After their business-class flight, she and her doting husband, neither of whom speak Japanese, arrived at their sparsely furnished walkup apartment in Japan’s fourth-largest city. While he threw himself into his teaching job, Cook was left to find her own way, which included doing household chores, heretofore anathema to her. Divided into six sections—laundry, cooking, transportation, shopping, cleaning and intermission—the book unfolds chronologically, covering the couple’s first year there. After bouncing back from the labor-intensive laundry work—they finally got a new washing machine—Cook gave up smoking cigarettes in bed with her morning coffee and found rewarding work of her own, teaching English to women and children at different places around the city. Few readers will be impressed by the author’s present-tense, repetitive, cliché-ridden prose, which is loosely sewn into brief paragraphs and choppy dialogue. For what her book lacks in style and substance, Cook attempts to make up for with her unfiltered opinions and no-holds-barred voice, fashioning her memoir as the equivalent of a printed-out blog. Most of the highlights occur during the heated but always loving exchanges between Cook and her husband, as they figure out how to make each other—and themselves—happy, and take up the evening ritual of meeting on their terrace to rehash their tribulations.
Good-natured vapidity.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-1003-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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