The conclusions reached are familiar, but Schaap’s talent for balancing self-revelation with humor, melancholy and wisdom...
A memoir from This American Life contributor and New York Times Magazine “Drink” columnist Schaap.
The author extolls the pleasures of “bar regularhood,” focusing on those establishments with distinct atmospheres—sometimes evoking European cafe societies, other times fondly portraying out-of-the-way places with colorful owners—to demonstrate how they can serve as “relief from isolation,” a “refuge from the too-deep and too-personal,” and a means for broadening one’s ability to listen and empathize with others. Schaap briefly acknowledges the negative aspects, especially for women who frequent bars alone, but she paints a mostly romantic portrait of discovering friendship and conviviality that is gradually tempered over time. Each chapter recounts her experiences in a particular bar—often in New York, with excursions to Dublin as well as Montreal—as touchstones that allow her to explore major turning points, from being a teenager who dropped out of high school and became a Deadhead to becoming a student at Bennington College, finding love, working as a chaplain in the aftermath of 9/11, as well as her father’s death, separation and bartending in the present. Schaap suggests that early trials served as catalysts for seeking company away from home, though she admits that the need for regularhood lessened with age. The author only briefly touches on alcoholism, one possible explanation for the hundreds of hours spent in bars; what remains is a brisk, lucid account of finding a tenuous peace after a period of escapism.
The conclusions reached are familiar, but Schaap’s talent for balancing self-revelation with humor, melancholy and wisdom turn an otherwise niche topic into one with greater appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-711-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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