A page-turner by someone who stopped waiting for Mr. Perfect.
Bay Area film critic Pols chronicles her unexpected pregnancy and journey into not-quite-single motherhood.
On the brink of her 40th birthday, the surprised author discovered that she was pregnant. Knowing that her fertile years were approaching an end, she decided to have the baby even if it meant doing it alone. Decision made, the next step was to contact Matt, the 29-year-old father-to-be. He was a good one-night stand, but Pols figured he would freak out when she told him the news. On the contrary, he was immediately supportive. “Everyone wants a child,” he insisted, and so this unlikely couple embarked on a journey to unconventional parenthood. (Matt stayed involved, but they did not resume their relationship.) The author is droll and exceedingly honest about bouts of morning sickness, her search for bigger, baby-friendly digs and her son’s birth, which is described in graphic detail. She airs perfectly legitimate annoyances with her co-parent, as well as her eventual coming to terms with his character. Matt may have had trouble being a responsible adult—at the time of their fling he lived in a hovel and had no job—but he proved to be a sensitive, caring father. Pols’s habit of recounting past love affairs quickly becomes tedious, though at least she keeps sentimentality at bay. Emotions do surface at times, but raw expression of feeling seems appropriate when describing her deep grief over the loss of her parents, which coincided with her foray into motherhood. Glimpses of her professional life enliven the text, and it’s too bad there aren’t more of them: Her accounts of trying to write Marlon Brando’s obituary on a day off without childcare and of a failed attempt to breastfeed during a screening of De-Lovely are far more interesting than her frequent assessments of Matt’s self-esteem.
A page-turner by someone who stopped waiting for Mr. Perfect.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-125692-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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