Lots of potential, but Palmer doesn’t deliver lyricism or insights to match the depths of her beloved dance. The wonderful...
Memoir that reads too much like a first draft about the author’s passion for the tango.
At 30, Palmer had done everything right. Educated at Cambridge, she worked for a blue-chip advertising firm and was off on a well-deserved vacation to Argentina. On her first night in Buenos Aires, a cousin took her to a tango club. She was hooked and spent the rest of her vacation taking tango lessons. Once home in New York, Palmer gave over her evenings to tango, dancing all over the city, searching for the perfect partner. Finally, she decided to quit her job and move to Buenos Aires to study tango full-time, with an eye toward becoming a professional dancer. But she wasn’t exactly leaping without a net; freaked that she might no longer be able to afford Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, she convinced her father to subsidize her new life. The bulk of the tale chronicles Palmer’s three Argentine years, during which she lost weight, honed her craft and mooned over a few red-blooded hotties. In 2002, she left Argentina, going into “early retirement” from her short-lived dance career. There the story ends, leaving readers to wonder: What did Palmer do with herself post-Argentina? (The galley’s author bio tantalizingly suggests that in 2003 she returned to live in Buenos Aires, but the text does not go into this.) What lessons did she learn, and what should the reader learn? Her only gesture in this direction is the anodyne reflection that “tango had connected me with ME.” The whole, however, suffers from Palmer’s choice to structure her recollections as a diary: daily blow-by-blow follows daily blow-by-blow. The benefit of such a conceit is immediacy, but immediacy here comes at the expense of reflection and rumination.
Lots of potential, but Palmer doesn’t deliver lyricism or insights to match the depths of her beloved dance. The wonderful cover, though, a retro b&w photo oozing restrained eroticism, is sure to catch a browser’s eye.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074292-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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