Hilarious, relatable, cringeworthy, and effortlessly entertaining, particularly for new parents or those in contemplation.
Self-deprecating reflections on the peaks and valleys of modern fatherhood.
Comedian Birbiglia and his wife, Stein, parlay their individual creative talents into a funny and wise memoir on parenting. Fusing good humor and raw honesty with selections from Stein’s evocative poetry, Birbiglia narrates his journey into parenting using material previously adapted for the Broadway stage. From the outset, the author admits to having “a low tolerance for children because I’ve lost a lot of great friends to kids.” He was up front about that fact since he and wife Stein got married in 2008, but when she casually mentioned that having children would “be different” for them, Birbiglia knew he was in store for some major changes. Though he outlines seven reasons for his reluctance about becoming a father—e.g., overpopulation, cancer history, a lack of great people in the world (“The men we used to think were great were priests, politicians, and gymnastics doctors. It hasn’t ended well for great”)—Birbiglia eventually warmed to the idea. The couple birthed their daughter, Oona, despite the author’s varicocele condition, demanding touring schedules, and Stein’s brutally difficult pregnancy. The author ably narrates these hurdles with the serious concern of a devoted husband and the comic timing of a seasoned entertainer. Throughout the book, Stein seamlessly interweaves her artistic verses, tempering all the facetiousness beautifully. Never clinical or overly extreme, Birbiglia’s lighthearted, refreshingly droll approach to starting a family will appeal most to readers who can identify with both his reluctance to couple up and his acceptance and embracement of parenting. There are also shared moments of introspection and maturity, not to mention useful wisdom. As Oona moved into toddlerhood, Birbiglia began to accept himself as the “decent dad” he never thought he could become.
Hilarious, relatable, cringeworthy, and effortlessly entertaining, particularly for new parents or those in contemplation.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0151-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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