Long on inventiveness but short on substance.
Ephemera from the life of a children’s book author.
In her latest book for grown-ups, Rosenthal (Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, 2005, etc.) again organizes stories of her life into something like a reference book or textbook. The author largely eschews written narrative in favor of a broad smattering of tables, graphs, drawings, photos, a guitar chord progression, a recipe, a dream, a Venn diagram, and more. Section headings like Geography, History, and Math divide and contain these tidbits along with mildly interesting thoughts and anecdotes: a moment's conjecture at who her husband is on the phone with, her faulty interpretation of a magazine article, her decision to leave an unopened packet of honey on the passenger-side floor of her car. One page reads, "When I came back from India, I was absolutely, positively 100% sure I was going to use a lot of turmeric." The book is light; white space abounds. Perhaps aware of this, Rosenthal leaps from the page into her readers’ digital lives, inviting them to text her for various multimedia experiences: three audio renditions of a humming wineglass or a poem read by the deceased poet Kenneth Koch. There is one anomalous short story in the Romance section that, despite its brevity (or because of it), is a moving tale of life, love, and anagrams. Readers who approach this book as a collection of thought experiments will find intermittent inspiration. Photos of two ice cubes—one from the waters of Lake Michigan, the other containing tea from a restaurant—poignantly commemorate moments with her children, and in “The Piñata Experiment,” the author instructs the reader to hang a candy-filled piñata near a baseball field and wait for the object's discovery by Little Leaguers serendipitously wielding baseball bats.
Long on inventiveness but short on substance.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98454-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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