Rosen draws readers into his peripatetic life with wit and sensitivity.
More than the usual travelogue.
Just out of San Diego State, Rosen decided to head for Asia. But it wasn’t a typical gap year. He had a leg up in Hong Kong, where his Chinese mother was raised, having extended family there and speaking Cantonese, so it was easy to get a job teaching English (to kids as young as 3!). On vacations, he planned to travel, test his independence, and see if he could be a writer. He fitted in visits to South Korea and Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia—even Spain and Germany. Some revealing and quirky chapter headings: “Mr. Pill” (his young charges had trouble with the “ph” diphthong), “My 5-Year-Old Guru,” “What We Can Learn From Nostalgia,” and “A Meditation on Travel Writing.” Rosen took to teaching immediately, though he has harsh things to say about the draconian expectations that Chinese parents lay on their children. Rosen does prove a promising writer. His word choice in sometimes peculiar (“American roads are ensconced [?] by a reasonable set of traffic laws”), but he is often capable of the aphoristic metaphor (“Perspective is malleable, and culture is the hammer”) that sticks in the mind. Cultural differences are a mainstay of travel writing, and the author gets a lot of mileage out of his being a laid back, middle-class SoCal kid landing in places where the language is the least of his problems. Determinedly open to experiences, he often succeeds in getting beyond the usual travelogue clichés. He is sometimes prone to the sententious but less so than most 23-year-olds and doesn’t take himself too seriously, which makes him a truly likable, fine host. “Mr. Pill” is now headed to grad school in journalism.
Rosen draws readers into his peripatetic life with wit and sensitivity. (acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-66-803362-1
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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