Voyeuristic and base but surprisingly engaging.
A woman's account of discovering her husband of 18 years had a second family and her confessions of her own affairs.
Freelance reporter Plump opens her book with an epigraph by W.H. Auden: "Hunger allows no choice." She then goes on to describe the terrible choices she and her husband, Bill, made for the duration of their union. In 2005, a close friend of Plump's disclosed to her that Bill had another house nearby, and he often stayed there with a girlfriend Plump didn't know existed. The most gutting news was that Bill and his mistress, Susan, shared an 8-month-old baby. When confronted, Bill offered confirmation but no explanation. Partly for the sake of their two sons, the author tried to save her marriage despite Bill's repeated lies about having ended his affair. As Bill, who traveled frequently for business, evaded his wife, Plump pieced together the timeline of his infidelity (it started 10 years earlier) and communicated with Susan. She writes candidly about her own indiscretions, recounting details about each of her three affairs. She began cheating on Bill during their first year of marriage. "Romanticizing adultery seems an unfair thing to do," she writes, "but the truth is that it can be transformational on every level." She finally separated from Bill after his duplicity became unbearable. In the final third of the book, the author examines the differences between having an affair and being the victim of adultery. Readers may vacillate between finding Plump's behavior indefensible and feeling sympathetic toward her.
Voyeuristic and base but surprisingly engaging.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-823-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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