Periodically charming but mostly pedestrian.
I’m young, I’m cool, I’m having a kid and I’m gonna get blog-ish about it.
In 2005, 23-year-old semi-party-girl Woolf—best known at the time for her contributions to the Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul series—found herself pregnant with the child of her boyfriend of four months, Hal. A truly good guy, he supported her decision to keep the baby; the couple moved in together and soon after tied the knot in Las Vegas. The remainder of her pregnancy had the same ups and downs as any other pregnancy, the only difference being that in Woolf’s mind she was a renegade hipster free spirit. Her healthy baby was a boy named Archer, she and Hal fell in love with him and suddenly Woolf’s priorities shifted from living in the moment to building a family. At least for the time being, all was good with the world. Mining the same territory as Neil Pollack’s much ballyhooed, equally uneven Alternadad (2007), Woolf isn’t above using raunch to illustrate a given situation: preparing for the birth, she notes, “My pussy is about to become a vagina. My tits are about to become breasts.” The shock value wears thin, as does her overly detailed account of the minutiae of childrearing. Like the output of many good bloggers turned not-as-good book authors, the narrative is fragmented and sloppily structured. Young mothers who weren’t prepared to have a baby may find comfort in this memoir, which demonstrates that other folks have not only survived but thrived in the face of an unexpected child. Those seeking a lasting piece of literature will be disappointed by this cobbled-together and smoothed-out version of Woolf’s popular blog, girlsgonechild.
Periodically charming but mostly pedestrian.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58005-232-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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