A smart, pocket-sized delight that artfully engages the funny bone.
A New York City–based author, mother of three and cancer survivor delivers an outspoken mix of sass and sensibility.
Magazine feature writer and novelist Kargman (The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund, 2009, etc.) truly believes that laughter is the best medicine and, at 36, is happy to share her self-deprecating brand of wisdom. She explains why baked goods, texting and the smell of gasoline are so personally enticing, as opposed to the repulsive qualities of vans, mimes (“I’m so talkative that the mute thing alone wigs me out”), Don Henley and the wacky au pairs entrusted to babysit during her childhood. Life has been adventuresome so far, Kargman admits, from her days as an outcast at a Connecticut boarding school to the irate, micromanaging boss at a pop-culture magazine who aimed a tape dispenser at her head. But her self-doubts pale in comparison to the confusion and humility experienced after being diagnosed with skin cancer at 35. There’s also tenderness in the unexpected blind date (arranged by her grandmother Ruth) with a “beyond-adorable, scruffy nugget” named Harry who would become her husband and the father of her children. Some laughs pop with snappy sarcasm while others veer into racy, stand-up comedienne material like sections on Jewish Passover Seders and a midlife crisis–inspired tattoo and handgun license. These over-the-top moments are leavened with more focused playfulness, as when the author writes of her solidarity with gay men, the agony of natural childbirth (“having a bowling ball cruise through a straw”), her disenchantment with office work or, after the birth of her first daughter, the co-mingling sessions with “a breed of hypercompetitive type-A mothers” known as “Momzillas.” Cute, rudimentary line drawings pepper a narrative that will incite nods of agreement as Kargman writes that “the ones who live the best obviously aren’t the ones with the most money or most successful careers; they’re the ones who laugh the most.”
A smart, pocket-sized delight that artfully engages the funny bone.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200719-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
