An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud—though not altogether atypical—story of soul-searching abroad.
A comical travel memoir documenting a young woman’s attempt to find herself overseas.
After playwright and aspiring actress Shukert (Have You No Shame?: And Other Regrettable Stories, 2008) unsuccessfully attempted to gain entrance into New York's acting elite, she ventured to Europe with the promise of a fresh start. En route, an Austrian custom's official absentmindedly forgot to stamp her passport, essentially giving her free reign throughout the continent. The author’s charming romp across Europe led her on an array of misadventures throughout Austria, France and Switzerland, before she settled in Amsterdam, where she had it on not-so-good authority that an acting role awaited her. The role fell through, but Shukert's experience in Amsterdam's Red Light District and marijuana-filled coffee shops functioned as entry points for even greater mishaps involving a predictable cast of characters, locals and expatriates alike. While the author’s travels left a trail of one-night stands and failed relationships in her wake, the humor with which she recounts her experiences allows her work to transcend beyond the cliché of overseas-love-affairs-gone-awry. Shukert is at her best when she probes the depths of her own identity, both as a transplanted Nebraskan Jew and as a failed actress. The humor drives the narrative, but the rare poignant moments are intimate and well-appreciated. Though readers will root for the author, it becomes difficult as she continually traps herself in nets of her own making. Shukert acknowledges this shortcoming, admitting that “I had come to Europe to grow up, to fall in love, to become the kind of person that I wanted to be. But the person I was becoming was destroying the person that I already was.” This confliction of identity, though regularly masked behind cheap laughs, is what sets Shukert’s book above similar travel memoirs.
An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud—though not altogether atypical—story of soul-searching abroad.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-178235-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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