Much good, little bad, no ugly.
An entertaining miscellany by journalist, rock critic, and cultural historian Marcus (Dead Elvis, 1991, etc.).
Marcus claims that Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton co-exist “in the common imagination as blessed, tawdry actors in a pretentious musical comedy cum dinner-theater Greek tragedy.” Occasionally Marcus revisits this theme in his motley collection of previously published (but here revised) columns and essays—but more frequently the President and the King exist only as ghostly presences amid Marcus’s ruminations on subjects as varied as the autobiography of Marianne Faithfull, an important new album by Bob Dylan (“a singer who . . . can still beat the clock”), and “Real Love” (the “latest pseudo-Beatles single,” produced by adding the voices of Paul, Ringo, and George to a recording of long-gone John). A number of these pieces are eloquent eulogies for various cultural icons—Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Cobain, Berkeley Free Speecher Mario Savio, actor J.T. Walsh, et al. Others are the latest of the author’s continuing attempts to figure out Elvis, “America’s secret angel; America’s secret demon.” Among the best of all is a keynote address Marcus delivered in 1998 at an Elvis conference. Beginning with an analysis of the pervasiveness of “Elvis jokes,” the piece moves into a provocative discussion of Presley and Clinton (“one man who could, and one man who can, charm you almost to death”). Also fascinating is his review of Pleasantville, which he describes as the flip-side of the popular body-snatcher films: “The aliens come to make the pod people human.” In a number of his essays Marcus rails against the Republicans who, in his view, refused to accept the legitimacy of Clinton’s elections, and he accepts as “perfectly factual” Hillary Clinton’s statement about the right-wing conspiracy to bring down her husband. Not surprisingly, then, he sees in the Right a pernicious political snobbery, a belief that “some people belong [in this country], and some people don’t.”
Much good, little bad, no ugly.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6513-X
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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