Droll wit and profundity swirl together in a revealing memoir from a successful comedy writer.
A producer and comedy writer for 2 Broke Girls and The King of Queens, among other programs, brings her humor to the homefront with these essays about her childhood and raising her own children.
Given Astrof’s extensive background in comedy, readers will expect humor throughout, and the author delivers with one punchline after another. The author clearly loves her children, but she prefers to leave the details of raising them to her husband. She shares a wide, wacky variety of stories: how she avoids returning home until she knows her kids are safely tucked in bed, how she handled a weekend at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park where signs warned swimmers not to enter the pool with “active” diarrhea (“I could only speculate as to what ‘active’ meant to the legal team…but mostly, I was grateful that I wouldn’t have to so much as dip a toe in that shit river”), how she reacted when her stash of candy dissolved while on vacation in Mexico; why she is convinced she’ll be murdered while on a work-related weekend with fellow writers; why a “fun” trip to the mall with her kids is anything but; and how an idyllic vacation in Hawaii turned into a fiasco thanks to one errant text message. Underneath the comedy, however, are details about the author’s difficult childhood living with verbally abusive parents who fought over her custody. She also grew up with weight and self-esteem issues and still has trouble with both concerns as an adult. The juxtaposition between the absurdity and the reality of Astrof’s life creates a mostly effective balance, which pushes this book beyond the slapstick visible at the surface and into a more reflective realm.
Droll wit and profundity swirl together in a revealing memoir from a successful comedy writer.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982106-95-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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