A boozy holler of a book, with a great soundtrack.
The Dartmouth frat escapades of the National Lampoon writer whose experiences inspired the film Animal House.
The Alpha Delta Phi house at Dartmouth was called “Animal House” for a number of reasons, the most famous of which involved some members who were haplessly chasing a chicken around the yard (eager to kill it for dinner), only to be brought up short when an upperclassman (known as “The Man”) plugged the chicken with a .45 slug from his upstairs room. Unfortunately for readers of Miller's biography about his sophomore Dartmouth year in 1960 at the AD house, nothing quite that eventful happens—it's action-packed but mostly of the binge-drinking, puking, pissing and trying-to-get-laid variety. Miller was a smart-ass gentile from the Long Island suburbs with a yen for girls, obscure rock 45s and Yiddish slang who found himself at home with the ADs, who treasured drinking and the bestowing of nicknames (Miller's is “Pinto”). The author writes that what “cartoon characters and AD brothers had in common was their exuberance,” a truism he proves time and again throughout these raucous, bleary pages where schoolwork is but a vague concern and the unceasing bacchanal is everything. Written in a juvenile, slangy rush, Miller's book has energy to spare. The stories are related mostly in streams of obscene dialogue and are focused on activities centered either immediately above or below the waist. There's a time limit on such behavior, of course, given the ADs' “amused cynicism about all human activity [and] Dadaistic displays of sociopathic behavior in public spaces,” and the attraction begins to pall at about the halfway point, not long after Miller/Pinto starts referring to himself in the third person. For Animal House completists, be assured, one can find here most of the film's raw elements, from the road trip, the band playing “Shout!” and even the Dean's decision to put the house on an unprecedented “triple warning.”
A boozy holler of a book, with a great soundtrack.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-05701-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
