A not always convincing, mostly amusing glimpse at the grinding gears of the young male in pursuit of love and economic...
A romantically challenged Londoner offers new strategies on playing the dating game, attempting to “make sense of something he doesn’t understand, using something that he does.”
With only a six-week duration as his relationship “personal best time,” Nicolson, a 20-something trainee solicitor for a British law firm, parlays his studies in economics and politics at Edinburgh University into unorthodox ways to view love, improve his chances at romance and demonstrate a correlation between love and the “clear-cut rational world of economics.” Applying the dismal science to the love game, the author explores online dating, where one’s “goods” are presented, displayed, brokered, ordered and possibly exchanged. “Playing hard to get” increases your demand by not overstocking and oversimplifying intentions. Nicolson shares personal dating anecdotes that range from the humorous to the cringe-worthy and astutely equates a fizzling love life with didactic market principles, complemented with graphs and charts. His sage best friend and patient sounding board Flora offers counsel, but her stern advice does little to dissuade his course of action, which can be outwardly sexist and overstated, as in a long-winded chapter involving the long wine lists at higher-end restaurants. Some correlations are cleverer than others, as when Nicolson establishes an economic correlation with the nice-guys-versus-bad-boys equation or how the eternal tug of war between the (married) sexes can be measured using market force predictors. After a long dry stretch, Nicolson admits to successfully dating a girl for a year, yet he eventually forgoes the strong, safe, bankable investment of a long-term relationship for the free-form “liquidity” of the single life. A chapter on Keynesian economics restores his confidence in himself and in love.
A not always convincing, mostly amusing glimpse at the grinding gears of the young male in pursuit of love and economic stability.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3041-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Marble Arch/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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