A restless yet satisfying memoir that will appeal most to women who’ve found themselves fleeing hopeless relationships.
Diary entries from a woman who left her marriage and husband for a freer existence.
Chaplin’s epistolary memoir, extracted from two years of recovered emails and journals she’d kept beginning in 2006, chronicles the dramatic, adventurous, and heartbreaking story of a restless married woman who’d fallen out of love with her husband of 13 years. The author opens with frustration and resentment at her “stoner” spouse, Josh, a formerly athletic Southern California surfer who remained glued to his video games while she wrote about her unhappiness in a secret daybook “to stave off going mad.” The author found catharsis through the “calming logic of language.” Desperate to abandon the rage-filled man she’d known since she was 20, the author eventually separated from him and moved to Dublin to meet her brother, Seth, who was touring with a rock band. In Dublin, Chaplin’s single life bloomed. Excited about the new world her separation inspired, the author writes feverishly of make-out sessions in the streets and of her passionate relationship with sexy Irish lad Kieran. Yet she felt like a “husk” when Josh called, on Christmas Eve, to ask for advice on a new relationship he’d begun with another woman in Los Angeles. Though the gears of this memoir grind a bit too erratically and self-consciously at times, Chaplin voices her intimate thoughts and emotions consistently and urgently enough to capture readers’ attention as well as their sympathy when the author’s free-for-all single life begins to sour. Memories of former happiness with Josh haunted her, and a serious bout of depression followed a spontaneously messy return to Ireland in an attempt to make miracles happen with the philandering Kieran. This a breezy, compelling slice of reality, as Chaplin openly shares her trials with a “freedom and exaltation such as I’d never known, as well as darkness that threatened to bury me.”
A restless yet satisfying memoir that will appeal most to women who’ve found themselves fleeing hopeless relationships.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3499-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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