A gratuitous work of celebrity worship.
One writer’s attempt to “celebrify” her life by following the examples of today’s leading ladies in pop culture.
In her opening introduction, Bertsche (MWF Seeking BFF, 2011) refers to the conundrum of celebrity culture as a classic “chicken-or-the-egg issue” in which she ultimately distills the problem into two questions: “Do we obsess over celebrities because we want to be perfect? Or do we want to be perfect because we obsess over celebrities? There’s no way to be sure.” These are valid questions that underscore the influence of the cult of celebrity, and though there is indeed no immediate answer, the questions themselves are a reminder that society is too fixated on the pursuit of looking and feeling good. This quest for perfection has led Bertsche to idolize a shortlist of celebrity women, all actresses except for Beyonce, who signify excellence in a particular quality of life. The author praises Jennifer Aniston for her toned body, Jennifer Garner for her perfect marriage and Julia Roberts’ Zen-like serenity. Readers witness Bertsche’s transformation from an undisciplined freelancer more likely to sleep in and snack than do yoga and prepare healthy meals into a monomaniacal, slightly watered-down version of a Stepford wife. Most troubling, however, is the book’s coda, which confirms the author’s delusional attitude when she looks forward to the day when she and her daughter can flip through the pages of celebrity magazines and “talk about the aspects of the stars we admire” and objectify at will. While Bertsche’s attempt to mold herself in the image of certain celebrities she believes are exemplars of fashion, physique, cooking, etc., is frivolous and superficial, not to mention at times embarrassing, some readers won’t blame her for at least trying to make a better life for herself, however misguided her efforts.
A gratuitous work of celebrity worship.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-54322-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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