A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.
Spectator columnist Kite turns some of her most wince-worthy experiences as a single woman into a humorous memoir, previously published in the U.K. as Real Life.
The author’s sometimes-rueful, sometimes-biting tone thwarts despair by turning every disaster into hilarious high drama. The book begins with Kite cancelling her wedding, underscoring how hard it is to find Mr. Right. She felt bad, of course, but she channeled her energy into the absurdities of dealing with “wedding-business” people who don’t believe in the phrase, “the wedding is off.” Even though her life was “in ruins,” the wedding gown vendor still wondered if she wanted to choose a different dress, as if that would change her mind. Working up to laugh-out-loud material, Kite writes of her “odd-job man” disappointments, including Tony, “a big, bearded man in his sixties,” possibly “the world’s most intellectual plumber” but clearly not the best man for the job, as he caused an “explosion of water” in her kitchen while repairing the boiler. Her dating life has been just as messy. A romance with a man who buys everything in groups of nine went sour when he insisted she line up her shoes just so. After more dating fiascoes, Kite sought help from a “relationship therapist” who charged £150 an hour and gave her leaflets with positive affirmations. Eager to have children but with no man in sight, the author investigated adoption, meeting a social worker who dashed her hopes with a series of Catch-22 questions. Readers might lose patience with Kite, a successful, well-educated, admittedly high-maintenance woman who has an exciting career in journalism and posh friends but is unable to manage her life, if she weren’t such a good writer and keen observer of human foibles, particularly her own. Even if we feel ambivalent about some of her choices, we can’t help but cheer her on.
A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250055149
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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