A sometimes-humorous, self-reflective chronicle of a triumphant journey through a troublesome childhood, chaotic young...
Actress, talk-show host and documentary film producer Lake is returning to television. Is there a better way to crank up the excitement level for a new talk show than with a tell-all memoir for your fans?
The author begins with a discussion of her abuse as a 7-year-old by the handyman in the family’s basement while her mother sat upstairs. Her parents’ lack of response to her trauma laid the groundwork for her emotional problems, manifested in Lake’s overeating habits. “To this day,” she writes, “I believe that it was my parents’ silence in the wake of the abuse—even more than the abuse itself—that wounded me so badly.” After seeing a Broadway production of Annie with her grandmother, Lake was determined to pursue her dream of becoming an actor. During her freshman year at college, Lake landed a starring role as Tracy Turnblad, a “fat girl who can really dance,” in John Waters’ Hairspray. From then on, the author’s life became a series of professional and personal successes followed by calamities and weight gain. At one time Lake weighed 260 pounds, but she landed a gig as the host of a provocative talk show, which aired for 11 years. She married and had two children, but her marriage ended in a nasty divorce. The births of her children changed Lake’s life, and she became a passionate advocate for the birthing rights movement, resulting in her documentary, The Business of Being Born. Following numerous failed relationships, author found a man who gives her “truly unconditional love.” For readers who revel in the vicissitudes of the lives of media personalities, Lake’s narrative will be a treat.
A sometimes-humorous, self-reflective chronicle of a triumphant journey through a troublesome childhood, chaotic young adulthood and fulfilled middle age.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2717-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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