Simple stories that remind readers there is more to Christmas than the stress of shopping, partying and striving to make...
Pleasantly amusing and tender stories of holiday cheer from the man in the red suit.
When Lizard agreed to don a Santa suit one Christmas for a local radio station and hand out toys to impoverished children, little did he realize that he had stepped into a role practically made for him. Having a natural white beard and hair helped with the role, but once he put on "the suit," he found that people of all ages just seemed to become "more generous, openhearted, and happy." With Lane's assistance, Lizard writes a humorous account of some of the memories accrued from two decades of playing Santa. That first season with the radio station led to more public appearances, some in malls and some in hospitals, where Lizard had to learn to shut down his own emotions and truly play the role of St. Nick, despite the ache he felt at seeing so many sick children. One small boy in particular left a deep scar, which the author has not been able to forget. Private gigs in homes where children tried to stump Santa with questions, such as why he used a shopping bag from the local store to carry his presents or why a child did not receive the requested BB gun, left Lizard scrambling for answers. As the years progressed, he found himself embodying the spirit of Santa year-round, which led to healthy lifestyle changes and embracing the spirit of Christmas, which, to Lizard, "happens anytime someone reaches out to another with love; when someone gives just for the sake of helping another fellow human being; when a child's eyes light up with the wonder of believing in miracles."
Simple stories that remind readers there is more to Christmas than the stress of shopping, partying and striving to make everything perfect.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40756-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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