A flawed but well-intentioned, genuine memoir.
Stage- and screenwriter and performer Balbirer (Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences, 2009) interweaves the story of her marriage with that of her beloved dog.
When Ira, the author’s 11-year-old beagle, was diagnosed with kidney failure, her personal life was in shambles. She and her husband of 11 years, Sam, had not had sex “in several years” and were exploring everything from couples’ therapy to New Age “love seminars.” Ira had been their “wedding gift to each other at a time when our partnership was the perfect alignment of taste, sensibility, humor, and love.” Now their marriage, which had withstood Sam’s decision to leave a career in law, infertility, a complicated pregnancy, and moves between Los Angeles and New York, was fraught with resentment and acrimony on both sides. Sam wanted the author to assume greater responsibility for their wine bar/restaurant business so that he could pursue a career in music. Balbirer worried about putting money neither one of them had into a business that seemed risky and the temporary nature of the life they built together in Manhattan. Meanwhile, the author spent thousands of dollars trying to keep Ira alive. Then Balbirer discovered that Sam was having an affair but continued to cling to the hope that she could somehow manage to save her marriage. Her health suffered and she lost weight, but slowly, she realized that the nostalgia for her marriage was really nostalgia for a romantic ideal that “had never existed.” When Ira died just over a year after his diagnosis, the author had finally come to terms with the fact that surrender to the truth of her situation was not about “giving up…[but about] letting go of the illusions.” Though too heavily focused on the minutiae of Balbirer’s relationship and sometimes difficult to follow due to the shifting chronology, the narrative offers an intimate look at the difficulties of marriage and a heartfelt tribute to a beloved dog.
A flawed but well-intentioned, genuine memoir.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4002-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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