Largely superficial, perhaps a guilty pleasure for fans of stereotypical beach reads.
A Los Angeles real estate agent’s memoir about her journey to Paris to find her soul mate.
A divorced, single mother of two children, Sizlo worked for a high-end real estate company that caters to celebrities and business executives. In LA, she writes, “Appearances mattered.” To that end, despite admittedly living paycheck to paycheck, she felt compelled to purchase expensive, trendy accessories to appease her potential clients. For her 44th birthday, her best friend bought her a reading with a “sought-after” astrologer even though she admits that she did not believe in astrology. When the astrologer stated that her soul mate was born in Paris on Nov. 2, 1968, the same birth date and location as her ex-boyfriend, Sizlo became intrigued. Over the course of the book, we see her intrigue turn to obsession as she jets off to Paris with the goal of meeting all men (and perhaps women) born on that date. The author also shares the poignant story of her father’s recent death and her promise to meet him in Paris on her quest to find true love. “My father bravely faced his destiny on his own terms,” she writes, “the perfect balance of fate and free will.” At the beginning of each of the 12 chapters, Sizlo includes a passage related to the relevant house of the zodiac. While the storyline is captivating on a soap-operatic level, the author’s often self-centered behavior—especially multiple instances in which her relentless pursuit caused her to ignore the interests and feelings of her sister and friends who accompanied her—may strain readers’ ability to feel compassion. Furthermore, in the early stages of the narrative, Sizlo provides little meaningful information about herself, making it difficult to be engaged in the outcome of her quest. The author eventually arrives at some level of self-realization near the end of her trip, but the overall narrative lacks depth or memorable insight.
Largely superficial, perhaps a guilty pleasure for fans of stereotypical beach reads.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-65326-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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