Carter’s book aims to make senior citizens, especially those in nursing homes, laugh, think and live more healthily.
In this far-ranging book, Carter provides his readers with jokes, stories and essays, history lessons about Jamaica and health care tips. Although much of the information can be found on the Internet, his engaging material and simple format will appeal to older readers. Senior citizens will be amused by the jokes Carter offers, many of which are geared toward their generation and have protagonists to which they can relate. For instance, in “Did ‘Old-Timers’ Set In?,” when a friend praises the protagonist for calling his wife “darling” and “sweetheart” after 53 years of marriage, the protagonist claims his pet names are merely the result of having forgotten his wife’s name 10 years ago. The jokes are succinct and snappily written, and readers will appreciate their easy wit. Additionally, Carter provides an intriguing historical account of Jamaica, contemplating simple elements like the country’s kitchen facilities and segueing into the more complicated role of women in Jamaican society. Carter employs a fascinating metaphor of “metamorphosis in the reverse” to describe contemporary Jamaica, claiming that the “emerald isle of the Caribbean has become a loathsome haven of crime and violence,” a “loathsome caterpillar.” Most useful are the health and safety tips Carter offers (with Eunice Carter, RN) in the book’s final chapters. Those who are elderly, particularly those who may be living alone, will gain tremendously from the advice offered. This advice is broadly inclusive, alerting readers to simple measures that nevertheless can be of great assistance; for instance, the author’s claim that “floors should be of non-slip and low glare material” and readers should “never combine multiple medications in the same bottle.” The book helpfully lists symptoms for various illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes, giving readers a reference to check before calling a physician, should they suspect illness. Additionally, the book offers tips to avoid illness altogether. With the wide range of topics covered, readers may wish the book included an easily referenced index. An intriguing, somewhat unwieldy, genre-defying book with much to offer senior citizens.
Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466382923
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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