This contrived memoir might have been a mildly entertaining blog or magazine article. For adult women without a single...
Tiresome chronicle of the author’s 52 friend dates in one year, and the psychology of friendship.
Once the golden glow of a new marriage settled into a daily routine, Bertsche realized she needed more than the constant love and attention of her husband. “But when I need to talk my feelings to death,” she writes, “really sit and analyze why I am confused/lonely/ecstatic, he’s just not up to it.” Additionally, “in your late twenties, friend-making is not the natural process is used to be. In fact, as it turns out, I’ve completely forgotten how to do it.” Stringing together her encounters with potential friends, Bertsche drops in snippets of scientific research concerning the nature of friendship along with anything else she thinks is relevant, including breast cancer, depression and her interviews with professionals regarding her friend quest. Along the way, the author experimented with online friending sites and experienced book clubs, a wellness cleanse at her yoga studio and a flash mob in her dance school. When she heard about a local friend matchmaker service, she signed up. “If I were more narcissistic,” she writes, “I’d think the local Chicago area was learning about my search and creating companies just for me.” Ultimately, her search succeeded. She was a better friend. She was more adventurous, independent and less naïve about the “idea of the attached-at-the-hip BFF.” She adhered to conventional rules of etiquette (many of which are generally learned in grade school), such as not interrupting others when they are speaking. Essentially, she became a happier, nicer version of herself.
This contrived memoir might have been a mildly entertaining blog or magazine article. For adult women without a single friend, maybe some of this recycled information will help.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-52494-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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