by Hunter S. Thompson illustrated by Ralph Steadman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1983
Fear and Loathing on the Kona coast of Hawaii: Thompson trots out his familiar act as Yahoo-anarchist-poète maudit—but despite a few inspired fits of zaniness, and some appropriately phantasmagoric drawings by Ralph Steadman, it just doesn't work. The Thompson-Steadman vision of Las Vegas made powerful symbolic sense because its neo-Boschian monstrosities seemed like a fun-house mirror of late 1960s America. Here too we get the (literally) incredible boozing and drugs, the violent antics of the journalist (assigned to cover the Honolulu Marathon) gone haywire, the sardonic put-on of outpigging the pigs. This time Thompson fancies himself the reincarnation of the Hawaiian god Lono, a brutal deity in charge of "the season of abundance and relaxation," who sailed away on a three-cornered raft promising to return. In 1779 when Captain Cook dropped anchor in Kealakekua Bay, the eager natives took him for Lono—though not for long. Thompson continually toys with the figure of Cook (as an archetypal arrogant imperialist, quite properly hacked to pieces) and interlards his ravings with many quotations from Richard Hough's The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook—a far more interesting text. Finally, after ignoring the Marathon ("Why do those buggers run? Why do they punish themselves. . . for no prize at all?") and enduring three weeks of furious tropical storms and sodden misery, Thompson saves his strange vacation by landing a 308 lb. marlin hours before flying back to Colorado. The one photo in the book shows Thompson (barely distinguishable from any other lei-garlanded tourist) grasping the dorsal fin of his catch in cool, self-mocking triumph: Lono has arrived. But he hasn't—just an occasionally amusing Haole and generally insufferable wise-ass.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1983
ISBN: 3822848972
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Reyna Grande ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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