Like spending time with your least ambitious and most charming friend.
Droll account of a circuitous path to responsible adulthood.
Enabled by a monthly allowance from her parents, Klam rolled through her 20s and into her 30s in a nebulous haze of bourgeois depression and daydreams about making it as a writer. Weeks and months floated by as she spent entire days listening to her headphones while walking around Manhattan in overalls, now and then reluctantly clocking in to work in her father’s office. Occasionally, her not-very-post-adolescent torpor was interrupted by an interview for a job as, say, Barbra Streisand’s assistant, or by an affair with a parasitic ex-con whose sponginess and lack of interest in being accountable rivaled the author’s. This material could well be annoying if Klam weren’t so funny, setting her scenes with an incisive, self-deprecating slant. Her memoir isn’t driven by action, but by conversational humor and revealing, original stories. (When her therapist touted the satisfactions of self-sufficiency, she countered, “But isn’t there also a satisfaction in getting someone to take care of you?”) Another appealing highlight is the author’s engaging rapport with her mother. Despite her avowed laziness, Klam landed a writing job at VH1, where she met her future husband and was nominated for an Emmy. The weakest part of the book is devoted to her obsession with such wedding trappings as a diamond ring and a tiara, the only acceptable accessories for “a beautiful princess in a ball gown.” Subsequent pages atone by chronicling Klam’s late introduction to real life. Her husband grappled with serious diabetes and joblessness; she sold her jewelry and was forced to find her professional footing. She gave birth to a daughter and found moderate financial success as a freelance writer for women’s magazines. Today she relishes, albeit somewhat sardonically, the rewarding flipside of growing up.
Like spending time with your least ambitious and most charming friend.Pub Date: March 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-980-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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