Prolific chick-lit novelist and funny girl Frankel (Thin Is the New Happy: A Memoir, 2008, etc.) dishes about what there is to love about hatred.
In her latest, the author explores the more unseemly side of her nature. The resulting string of essays on negativity and its pursuits includes a number of hilarious moments alongside helpful, hard-won insights into parenting and the nature of complaining. When presented with the grim news that she and most of her family are genetically predisposed to a variety of abdominal cancers, Frankel opted to look within to see whether a change of attitude might improve her state: “My doctor told me the hate in me just had to come out. I followed his orders, fessing up to jealousy, phoniness, coldness, bitterness, insecurity, envy, distrust, impatience, revulsion, pettiness, bitchiness. Name the hate, I let it out. The big question: Was I happier for it?” Answer: not entirely. “I’d say that I was generally more ‘er’ about all of my emotions,” writes Frankel, “which (bonus) made me deeper.” Though longing for the critical acclaim afforded select other members of the chick literati, the author confesses an unwillingness to dispense with her self-professed shallowness: “If misery were required for depth, I’d rather be a lesser artist. In fact, I was a lesser artist.” Frankel admits having been born into a family of “kvetchperts,” and she looks to her youth, when she was rejected by the “in” crowd and criticized by her mother because of her weight. Though this loosely chronological account exhibits the vague arc of plot development and emotional growth, the memoir lacks the narrative cohesion and relevance needed to give it the je ne sais quoi of a bestseller. With humor, Frankel shrewdly probes her darkly shallow places.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60978-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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