Tough love, life lessons, and biting wit combine smoothly with spunky self-help in this must-have for podcast “Murderinos.”
Timely advice and personal anecdotes from the My Favorite Murder true-crime podcast duo.
In an effective combination of in-your-face realism and plucky humor, sitcom writer Kilgariff and former Cooking Channel host Hardstark deliver the details on navigating life with a tough skin, providing nuanced autobiographical stories and familial memories. In alternating segments, they share the details of their up-and-down pasts, which helped to shape them into the formidable and successful women they remain today. Kilgariff contributes anecdotes from a youth scarred by her mother’s premature death from early-onset Alzheimer’s; later, she dealt with an escalating drinking habit. Sharing the wisdom they’ve collected, the authors offer hard-won truths about themselves as well as timeless reminders about self-care, life balance, relationships, substance abuse, and the restorative power of “kindred spirit” friendships like the one they share. Hardstark writes that though the humanitarian need to help others might come naturally, it should never be done at the expense of one’s personal safety, especially for women: “The politeness that we’re raised to prioritize, first and foremost, against our better judgment and whether we feel like being polite or not, is the perfect systematically ingrained personality trait for manipulative, controlling people to exploit.” She connects this wisdom with memories of her rebellious adolescence observing her divorced mother’s toxic dating life while fully embracing the staunch Riot Grrrl scene (“feminism…delivered in a punk rock package”). A lack of self-esteem led to a sketchy encounter with a lecherous photographer and future psychotherapy sessions to process issues and reboot her psyche. Infused with personality, charm, and clever banter, the narrative effectively reflects both authors’ separate histories, and they helpfully dispense plenty of worldly advice on how to survive with a street-smart attitude and a fierce sense of self-preservation.
Tough love, life lessons, and biting wit combine smoothly with spunky self-help in this must-have for podcast “Murderinos.”Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17895-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
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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