An entertaining bucket-list tale.
A quirky list of accomplishments in memoir form.
“Being an immigrant is akin to surviving a near-death experience—minus the excitement,” writes debut author Shifrin. “You constantly feel like you were given a second shot at life, and you want that shot to amount to something spectacular.” Originally from Russia, the author was turning 30 when she set out to write this book. She explains how her life was full of excitement, especially her 20s, which she calls “sloppy, sexy, sometimes sweet.” In preparation for her birthday, Shifrin established a list of all the things she needed to do before she hit 30. The book gathers the items on the list, each one with an accompanying story. Among the goals she set: take a writing class, live in a different country, land a late-night comedy set, fall in love (for real), buy real furniture, have a dramatic airport reunion, learn how to dress my body, etc. “I am living proof,” she writes, “that you can blossom from an awkward caterpillar into an awkward butterfly—a sharply dressed awkward butterfly who commands attention because she is comfortable in her clothing and looks like a consummate, trendy professional.” Shifrin continually tries to grasp why any said item on the list is integral to her development. When she moved to Taiwan for a “shitty job,” she quickly realized that even though she managed to leave America and live abroad, the abuse she endured at her work was not worth the limited opportunities her job offered her. The author also shuffled through a series of uncommitted relationships before she found the man with everything she looked for in a partner. Throughout, Shifrin gives readers a taste of what successful self-deprecation looks like; she constantly pokes fun at herself, analyzing the situations she put herself in and figuring out how they affected her journey.
An entertaining bucket-list tale.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12971-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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 2025 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.
