A surprisingly evocative account that, perhaps as a result of its author’s current career as a therapist, at times veers...
Sure to be marketed as an exposé on raising Courtney Love, the walking car crash of our time, Carroll’s is an unassuming and reflective coming-of-age memoir.
Carroll’s adoptive parents provided her creature comforts but no real tenderness. Mom Louella was one of those cold and sometimes cruel wealthy women of countless melodramas; though always perfectly appointed, her outbursts revealed a severely damaged core (Carroll’s biological mother, she would later learn, is the memoirist Paula Fox). Unlike Louella, father “Jack” was warm and (overly) affectionate—his constant ogling of his daughter crossed over into fondling more than once. Carroll’s childhood and teen years mimic those of countless rebellious, too-smart-for-their-own-good youths; she gets kicked out of several Catholic schools, dates a James Dean greaser and just after high-school graduation, falls in with a crowd of hedonistic, pseudo-intellectual San Francisco bohemians. One of these, eccentric wannabe professor Frank, fathers Carroll’s first child, known to the subsequent generation as rock star Courtney Love, just after Carroll’s 18th birthday. A string of marriages and children follow—three and five, respectively. As Carroll finally confronts her psychological demons and navigates a path toward happiness, she watches her eldest (only sometimes estranged) daughter, the violent and untameable Courtney, live out her dramatic downward spiral in the public eye. Carroll has a strength for capturing her various environments—from the Haight-Ashbury beatnik scene of the late ’60s, to her New Age, post-hippie life in New Zealand in the ’70s. But the plodding chronology of “then-this-happened” has a dulling effect.
A surprisingly evocative account that, perhaps as a result of its author’s current career as a therapist, at times veers dangerously close to self-help territory.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51247-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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
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