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MAEVE IN AMERICA

ESSAYS BY A GIRL FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

A warmly intelligent and insightful collection.

An Irish comic and writer gathers essays about her experiences living and working in the United States.

In this sharp and readable book, Higgins (We Have a Good Time…Don’t We?, 2013, etc.) tells the story of how she came to America as an adult still learning how to go about “the endlessly tricky business of being a regular human being.” In “Rent the Runway,” for example, she details her experience of renting a decidedly unmagical—but more affordable—second-choice gown for her first New York ball. The process uncovered all of the author’s personal insecurities, but a moment of grace at the ball made her realize that she was more than just her attire. In “Pen as Gun,” Higgins turns her attention to her profession, discussing an especially memorable experience leading a comedy workshop in Iraq. Working with Muslim comics who spoke truth to power made her acutely aware of “the sliver of shared space between comedy and tragedy,” and it gave her insight into the dark humor of her Northern Irish counterparts. A keen observer of culture, the author offers timely insights about race and immigration in America. In “Aliens of Extraordinary Ability,” she describes how Irish-American nostalgia often imagines an Ireland that never existed; at the same time, she muses on the privilege her “indoor ghost face” has conferred on her in America. Higgins points out how early Irish immigrants learned how to collaborate in the oppression of other minorities to get ahead but how descendants like Mike Pence continue to ignore the crucial role race played in their ascension to (white) success. Her own commitment to truth before humor emerges clearly in “Wildflowers.” Unable to keep a promise to a producer that she would turn a podcast about immigration into comedy fluff, the author lost the show but maintained her integrity. Witty, humane, and topical, these essays offer an enlightened perspective on modern American culture while probing the energetic inner life of a bright young Irish comic.

A warmly intelligent and insightful collection.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-14-313016-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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