Snarky, unconventional humor that pokes fun at just about everything.
One woman’s quirky perspective on life.
The creator of Bravo’s Odd Mom Out, Kargman (Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut: Essays and Observations, 2011, etc.) dishes out a variety of essays that poke fun at herself, her family, friends, and the world in general. Short, acerbic, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, the narratives come from her experiences as a teen, a wife, a mother, and from observations of the world around her. In “Orlandon’t,” she covers the multiple reasons not to take your child to Disney World: the color scheme, the endless lines, the expensive and tacky merchandise, etc. She writes about things that irk her—children in leopard leggings, identical twins who are dressed alike, tapas bars, “people in the audience at the Oscars who clap harder for some dead people than other dead people”—but also offers sweeter pieces such as her celebration of her mother’s words of wisdom. Her humor is often laced with expletives and slang terms, adding a hipster attitude that’s not really needed to achieve the level of humor she’s striving to reach. If you want to know how she and her family got coveted plots in a cemetery on Nantucket, read “Dying to Get In.” Curious to know who she’s had a lifelong crush on? “You’re the One that I Want.” Ever wonder what a stripper class is like? Kargman attended one and lets you know what she thinks. Everything is fair game as the author babbles about the difficulty of getting her son into kindergarten in New York, why her family resembles the Munsters, being a Jewish child and attending summer camp in Maine, questions she poses to the universe, her love of Thanksgiving, or euphemisms she’s invented. The collection is an odd mix best read in short spurts. Prepare to laugh, but then move on, as this fluff is not very filling.
Snarky, unconventional humor that pokes fun at just about everything.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-59457-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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.
