A witty, entertaining memoir offering guidance on the precarious integration of life and love.
A relationship columnist fuses sage advice with dispatches from her own personal life.
After getting unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, Boston Globe entertainment reporter Goldstein (The Singles, 2012, etc.) jumped at the opportunity to pen her own recurring online feature devoted to the local Massachusetts dating scene. “Love Letters" debuted in 2009, and the author shares the inaugural letter from a frustrated woman concerned about her boyfriend’s commitment potential. The column came equipped with a “robust comments section” in which readers shared their reactions, and which Goldstein liberally shares throughout. Featuring a lively mix of experiences in love, dating, intimacy, and other topics, the column became an immediate sensation, and the author’s inbox crested with pleas for counsel. Despite a lack of psychology acumen, she parlayed her talent for dispensing rational advice to family and friends directly into her writing. This made her accessible, shrewd, and relatable, and her real-world advice leveled the playing field with the everyday people who read (and responded to) the column. Goldstein is at her strongest when tackling such issues as platonic workplace relationships, managing the sting of rejection, uneven sex drives in a relationship, and risky interoffice romances; all of these are issues the author has encountered and overcome. As the years progressed, her reading audience and popularity ballooned along with her confidence level in dispensing advice. She tackles the ethics of relationship snooping, age-related woes of the heart, and pornography use while periodically dealing with the trolls in the comments section. Goldstein’s hybrid of guidance and confessional turns poignant when she discusses her mother’s cancer diagnosis and she is relegated to finding “extreme escapism” tactics and time with a caregiver support group to balance the emotional toll of the situation. Charming chapters on sex and her reluctant re-entry into the dating world strike another harmonious balance of breezy and informative.
A witty, entertaining memoir offering guidance on the precarious integration of life and love.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4377-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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