Life derails a commissioned meditation on Kerouac from a young American writer.
On assignment from his publishers to reappraise On the Road in the age of Obama, Buzzell (My War: Killing Time in Iraq, 2005) admits that while he adored Kerouac as a teenager and has several copies of the book, including a first edition, after a tour in Iraq, he had lost his passion for it. More to the point, he was distracted by two personal events: his mother’s terminal illness and the birth of his son. At loose ends, in mourning and frankly wanting to postpone the responsibilities of married life and fatherhood, Buzzell decided to make a journey all his own, starting in San Francisco and following his whims to discover America on his own terms. His travels took him to Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Denver, Omaha, Des Moines and, most enduringly (and endearingly) to Detroit before he winding up almost by chance in New York City. Along the way, he drove and lost money on an ice-cream truck, cleared land with a chainsaw for a new Safeway, sold used items at a Salvation Army and engaged in a lot of drinking and spending time in flophouses, his preferred mode of lodging. For nearly half the book, the narrative is as rootless and random as the author’s wanderings at first. Buzzell was amusingly unimpressed with himself, and he lets the reader in on his self-doubts about the project at hand every step of the way. It’s only in Detroit, where he openly assumed the role of writer, that he truly found his footing as a witty, fearless, sharp-eyed chronicler of America in decline. Time, Inc.’s purchase of a “safe house” in an upper-class enclave for its reporters to cover Detroit’s devastation reminds him of Baghdad’s Green Zone, where American reporters idled in high style between jaunts into the wrecked city to cover the war. Besides being intensely self-aware, Buzzell exhibits a Henry Miller–like talent for the memorable character sketch, and Detroit gives him plenty of subjects. A slow starter with a strong finish.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-184135-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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