Best left on the shelf.
A Brooklyn-based journalist and novelist (Everyone and No One, 1997, etc.) takes his family on an exceptionally tedious global adventure.
Jacobson’s account of their three-month trek from Thailand to England, with extra chapters by eldest daughter Rae, resembles nothing so much as an interminable evening of slide-watching at a neighbor’s house. Readers are “treated” to inside jokes, bizarre capitalization (“So now we were back at the Burning Ghat, with The Future in tow, the Three of Them”), and self-satisfied comments (“The earth, which was round, was lucky to have us”). The family travels to India, where the three children are upset by the Varnasi cremation pyres, and to Cambodia, where they are distressed by the Toul Sleng genocide museum. Jordan is a relief: it’s clean, new, and has the advantage of being the first place on the trip where Jacobson and his wife haven’t been before. While Jacobson reflects at length about his past, and writes pages about each of the children, his wife is hardly mentioned. Her entire identity consists of having had cancer some time before the trip and having made a similar trek with her husband 20 years earlier. From Jordan the family moves on to Egypt (briefly considering relocating to Cairo), then to Israel, to France (where 16-year-old Rae finally meets up with her New York friends), and eventually to England. In between destinations, Jacobson muses about his eldest—brilliant, but failing high school; about middle child Rosalie, a self-assured 12-year-old; and about 9-year-old Billy, obsessed with computer games and sneakers. The author offers no insights save those that would be meaningful to his family, and his humor reads as arrogance: “It was one thing for Cambodians to eat tarantulas—they even ate durians, the only fruit that smelled like a busted sump pump. But a white guy eating a tarantula? This raised the stakes.”
Best left on the shelf.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-852-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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