- Save $10 when you spend $50 and pay with Bill Me Later. The fast and convenient way to buy without using your credit card. Offer limited to items purchased from Amazon.com between July 14, 2008 and July 21, 2008. One per customer account. Enter code BMLSAVES at checkout. Here's how (restrictions apply)
Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
|||||||||
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Depth Takes a Holiday by Sandra Tsing Loh  (46)
|
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now by Sandra Tsing Loh  (10)
|
Aliens in America by Sandra Tsing Loh (7)
|
(45)
$10.36
|
The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life by Laurie Notaro  (162)
$11.20
|
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
With Tsing Loh (Depth Takes a Holiday) behind the wheel, readers are in for a crackling, witty, loop-the-loop rideno air bags, no seatbeltsacross the interior landscape of an almost-40 writer coping with the pressures and irritations of modern society. She targets such social phenomena as the Zone Diet, health clubs, plastic surgery and mass joke e-mails. Old standbys like marriage, older siblings, money and advertising are deftly dealt with, though she teeters on overkill with her primary obsession, aging. Tsing Loh, whose humorous neuroses will be familiar to listeners to public radio's Morning Edition and Marketplace, struggles with the friction between where she thinks her career, marriage, health and beauty should be and where they actually rate, with hilarious fallout. This self-described downwardly mobile nonachiever views the world through "dung-colored glasses," though her message brightens as she frees herself of youthful goals and comes to accept her age and station. Tsing Loh incorporates into her text crossed-out sentences, e-mail correspondence and outtakes from her television forays. Unfortunately, her frenetic pace and humor slow in the final section. And while the book's title suggests the looming presence of an oppressive Van Nuys, the Los Angeles suburb lacks the full intensity of Tsing Loh's ferocious stare, save for some early references (e.g., it regularly ranks as one of the worst places to live in America). But that unfulfilled promise shrinks in the face of Tsing Loh's white-knuckled, dirty-fingernailed imagination. (May)Forecast: Tsing Loh will launch her new book at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, which she's emceeing, and will tour the West Coast. Readers throughout the rest of the nation should expect to hear Tsing Loh bemoaning Van Nuys on the radio, the first printing of 20,000 copies should sell briskly.
From Booklist
Thirtysomething Loh's account of the year she came to terms with the novel she'd never finish; her perfectly manicured sister; and five months spent away from her husband (he was in a band on a cruise ship) bounces from embarrassed giggles to straight-out guffaws. Interspersing her autobiographical musings with e-mail from the Web site she wrote for, squiggly diagrams suggesting Roz Chast gone mad, and encounters with her spouse, sister, therapist, and former coworkers, Loh reaches quite lovely heights of parody. A high point is her skewering of writers' groups ("Before you take that year off and write a novel, ask yourself, when's the last time I sat down and read one?"), but she's equally sharp when characterizing her mother-in-law's conversation ("fractals of stories") or insisting that she has no cultural identity whatsoever. She does have minor plastic surgery, and she's not kind to the one person featured in her account who actually is middle-aged, but it's fractured, funny, and reads like an extended NPR rap just before the top of the hour. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
With Tsing Loh (Depth Takes a Holiday) behind the wheel, readers are in for a crackling, witty, loop-the-loop rideno air bags, no seatbeltsacross the interior landscape of an almost-40 writer coping with the pressures and irritations of modern society. She targets such social phenomena as the Zone Diet, health clubs, plastic surgery and mass joke e-mails. Old standbys like marriage, older siblings, money and advertising are deftly dealt with, though she teeters on overkill with her primary obsession, aging. Tsing Loh, whose humorous neuroses will be familiar to listeners to public radio's Morning Edition and Marketplace, struggles with the friction between where she thinks her career, marriage, health and beauty should be and where they actually rate, with hilarious fallout. This self-described downwardly mobile nonachiever views the world through "dung-colored glasses," though her message brightens as she frees herself of youthful goals and comes to accept her age and station. Tsing Loh incorporates into her text crossed-out sentences, e-mail correspondence and outtakes from her television forays. Unfortunately, her frenetic pace and humor slow in the final section. And while the book's title suggests the looming presence of an oppressive Van Nuys, the Los Angeles suburb lacks the full intensity of Tsing Loh's ferocious stare, save for some early references (e.g., it regularly ranks as one of the worst places to live in America). But that unfulfilled promise shrinks in the face of Tsing Loh's white-knuckled, dirty-fingernailed imagination. (May)Forecast: Tsing Loh will launch her new book at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, which she's emceeing, and will tour the West Coast. Readers throughout the rest of the nation should expect to hear Tsing Loh bemoaning Van Nuys on the radio, the first printing of 20,000 copies should sell briskly.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Booklist
Thirtysomething Loh's account of the year she came to terms with the novel she'd never finish; her perfectly manicured sister; and five months spent away from her husband (he was in a band on a cruise ship) bounces from embarrassed giggles to straight-out guffaws. Interspersing her autobiographical musings with e-mail from the Web site she wrote for, squiggly diagrams suggesting Roz Chast gone mad, and encounters with her spouse, sister, therapist, and former coworkers, Loh reaches quite lovely heights of parody. A high point is her skewering of writers' groups ("Before you take that year off and write a novel, ask yourself, when's the last time I sat down and read one?"), but she's equally sharp when characterizing her mother-in-law's conversation ("fractals of stories") or insisting that she has no cultural identity whatsoever. She does have minor plastic surgery, and she's not kind to the one person featured in her account who actually is middle-aged, but it's fractured, funny, and reads like an extended NPR rap just before the top of the hour. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|