Former Soul Coughing singer Doughty’s memoir about sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and the spiritual benefits of world travel.
The author half-seriously calls his book “just another drug narrative,” and it's true. There’s nothing about Doughty’s longtime love for pot, coke, heroin and Ecstasy that hasn’t already been superseded by hundreds of other rock-star druggies who eventually replaced compulsive drug use with some form of equally compulsive religious behavior. What makes this story tolerable is not his voracious appetite for drugs and groupie sex but rather the mundane facts of his life as a mid-level rock star. Born the privileged son of a West Point–educated military historian, Doughty grew up knowing only a whitewashed suburban existence. He moved to New York City in the early 1990s to become an East Village creative type, putting together what seemed like just another acoustic act playing the NYC club circuit. But within a year of its inception, Soul Coughing got snapped up in the post-Nirvana major-label signing frenzy. The band consisted of Doughty on guitar and vocals and three jazzbo sidemen whose main function seemed to be busting Doughty’s chops for his lack of musical ability. After readers get to know his insufferable band mates, the author’s addiction becomes more understandable. Yet there’s also something desperately exhibitionist about Doughty’s willingness to recount in brutally frank detail even the most miserable experiences with drugs, groupies, itinerant girlfriends and prostitutes. More interesting than the sex and drugs, however, are the poisonous band dynamics that eventually destroyed Soul Coughing. Though Doughty’s inevitable turn to rehab spiritualism is neither interesting nor inspiring, the stories of his exotic world travel—trips to Cambodia and Ethiopia, for instance—offer a few memorable culture-clash moments. Another mostly enjoyable but unremarkable excess-leads-to-the-palace-of-wisdom drug memoir.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-81877-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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