A funny, touching, and ultimately uplifting story of a woman searching for love and purpose.
A memoir about a 70-something widow navigating the world of 21st-century dating.
In her nonfiction debut, Weissinger interweaves stories of her early life with tales of participating once again in the dating world, many years after her husband’s death. She’d lost her spouse to esophageal cancer when she was 57, and her account in these pages details her search for someone else to invite into her life in her 70s. But on what terms, she wondered, and to what end? Was she looking for someone as just a buddy, as a more serious companion, or as a potential husband? These questions almost immediately seem coy, because as the narrative progresses, her search for romance become clear. Over the course of the book, the author tells of how she spent time on internet dating sites, such as Our Time and Zoosk, and relates stories from her experience that readers of any age who’ve also tackled the dating scene will find familiar. Interspersed among these accounts are reminiscences drawn from Weissinger’s nondating life. She writes about her rocky relationship with one of her daughters; her experiences with her late husband, Matt, including some very moving passages about his final days; and her many activities later in life, from volunteering at animal shelters to working with medical organizations as a Spanish-language translator. However, the primary focus of the book remains the author’s search for a new significant other in her life.
The wry, upbeat humor of that search is the key attraction of the book. Throughout the narrative, Weissinger consistently portrays herself as a dogged optimist—someone who’s always hoping and striving to see the best in people. This quality comes out in her nondating stories, too, and most clearly in several of her anecdotes about her adult children and her experiences in Latin America. However, the war stories from online dating carry the narrative. Weissinger is low-key and funny about the men that she encountered, including a guy with a tattoo that linked his eyebrows, “bearded Santa Claus types wearing John Deere caps and drinking beer,” a “dude with obviously dyed, coal black Dracula-style hair” (“a black it had never been in his twenties,” she gently adds), and “the one whose selfies made him look like a wanted criminal on FBI posters.” These lighthearted misadventures are skillfully counterbalanced with emotionally revelatory passages about her time volunteering in the Dominican Republic. At first, she asked herself, “Hadn’t I aged out of this kind of adventure?” But soon, she describes herself as feeling “stripped of superfluous trappings, in touch with the essence of what matters in life, close to my skin, and accepted into others’ skins and lives.” There are a few passages and threads along the way that feel a bit predictable, but her portraits of the many people she met on her journeys are rendered with contagious sympathy and energy, which makes for a confident, quality remembrance.
A funny, touching, and ultimately uplifting story of a woman searching for love and purpose.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64-742315-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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