Entertaining fluff.
Just when you’d think memoirs couldn’t get more self-parodying, a first-time author spills all about her obsession with psychics.
Lassez, a sometimes-employed actress in L.A., turns to psychics to determine if she’ll ever land a big role, or a man. Though these seers are only occasionally accurate, and then only about the most obvious things, she gets hooked. Her self-styled “addiction” is really just a conceit that allows her to ramble on about life as a broke, 30-year-old singleton in Hollywood. She could have transformed the one-dimensional palaver into something a bit more substantial had she been willing to offer even a little self-scrutiny. In passing, Lassez mentions an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder diagnosis and scoring some free Zoloft from the wife of a doctor, but the closest she ever comes to examining her fixation with tarot is wondering, “When would I land the role of ‘Sarah Lassez,’ a woman with a life?” Fortunately, the silly subject matter is redeemed by the author’s self-deprecating sensibility and deadpan humor. Lassez’s ruminations about an engagement ring that is never offered, her description of a week spent rehabbing at her parents’ ranch and her transcription of the one lone therapy session she attends are hilarious. She manages never to take herself too seriously—an important quality in a narrator who is constantly kvetching about being dumped. When told by her shrink to join a 12-step group, Lassez admits that she’s looked into it already, but there is no Psychics Anonymous: “If I was lucky enough to be addicted to heroin I’d be at a meeting right now.” Further bolstering the book’s oddball charm is a likable cast of supporting characters. Readers may turn the last page wishing they could hang out with Lassez’s best friend Gina, who deserves an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Creative Nonfiction.
Entertaining fluff.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-1838-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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