Uneven, forced humorous essays on mundane topics.
Comic and essayist Notaro (The Potty Mouth at the Table, 2013 etc.) is back with another round of commentaries on her semiscattered life.
Whether she's depicting her childhood dumpster-diving for her grandfather, who displayed the weird items she found in the backyard, sharing her Nana's recipes for meatballs, gravy, and vodka sauce, or complaining about the pronunciations used in a cheese-making class, the author attempts to find humor in everything—even things that aren't funny. She discusses raising chickens in the backyard, the demise of the Twinkie, making jerky treats for her dog, being overweight (“So. The Fat Talk. We were having the Fat Talk. In a doctor’s office because my doctor was too chicken shit to call me fat to my face. Instead, he sent his formerly fat nurse to break the news to me that I was chubby”), and basically anything else that has happened to her, to someone she knows, or even to complete strangers. Occasionally, the author hits the mark, as in her title essay, in which she chronicles her attempts to work her way through a clear-the-clutter-toward-a-better-and-more-spiritual-life book. Regarding her attempts to cull her collection of books: “But when I got to the part where she talks about throwing away books that hadn't been read, I had enough and closed the book. Those words are nothing short than the rantings of a lunatic. Madness….Tossing books you've never read is not just a sin, it's a crime, one worthy of capital punishment. Frankly, if I walk into your house and you don't have 200 books in there somewhere that you haven't read yet, I don't trust you." Overall, the laugh track is turned up too high for comfort, with the effects being pushed on readers without much subtlety. But for those who like trite, in-your-face sitcom humor, this will appeal.
Uneven, forced humorous essays on mundane topics.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88608-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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