Alternately appalling, aggravating and amusing.
Carrie Bradshaw meets Barbara Ehrenreich in this memoir about white-collar unemployment after the dot-com bubble burst.
Jen Lancaster was bratty but hardworking: She put in 60 hours a week at her corporate job and enjoyed blowing her paycheck on a Chicago penthouse and pricey shoes. But after a company merger, she was let go with one week’s salary as her severance pay. Lancaster’s layoff came in the midst of the 2001 economic downturn. At first, she was cushioned by her live-in beau’s earnings; in fact, Fletch and Jen went ahead and tied the knot, crassly reasoning that they would receive a lot of green wedding gifts. Then hubby got fired too, and the newlyweds spiraled downward. Eventually, their car was repossessed, and Fletch stopped taking his anti-depressants because he could no longer afford them. Lancaster kept up her spirits by volunteering at an animal shelter, and, of course, starting a blog. So it’s no surprise that she proves to be the type of writer who resorts to FREQUENT CAPS, italics and eye-rolling exclamations: “Are you trying to tell me that . . . I, the bride, am not allowed to JOIN THE REST OF MY WEDDING PARTY?” All the component parts of chick-lit are here: to-do lists (“Find a job! Lose weight”), transcriptions of instant-message conversations and email exchanges—indeed, the emails from the still-employed Jen to her friend Melissa, in which Jen repeatedly has to cancel social plans because of work commitments, could have come straight from the pages of Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002). All’s well that ends well, however. Jen snags a book contract and realizes that “[my] values have changed completely. . . . I could care less about Dior’s newest line of lip gloss.”
Alternately appalling, aggravating and amusing.Pub Date: March 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-451-21760-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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