Touching, humorous and in the end wise account of how a Hollywood brat transcended lifelong resentment of his father by...
Mr. Spock’s soul-searching son struggles with a classic Hollywood midlife crisis and emerges from his iconic dad’s shadow.
For Nimoy, avoidance was always the cure for dealing with stress. Drifting between careers, from self-destructive TV director to disenchanted entertainment lawyer, he woke up one morning in a sleeping bag in an empty apartment, freshly divorced and wondering how everything fell apart. After 30 years of pot-smoking escapism, the 40-something father of two finally sobered up and discovered he needed to reinvent himself, which meant an end to his miserable marriage and a new job as a substitute teacher in Santa Monica. With drugs no longer an option, he found shelter in sharpening his carnivorous dating skills by chasing tight-jeaned blondes at his weekly AA meetings. Perhaps in reaction to his childhood with (but mostly without) a workaholic and absentee father, connecting with his own children became the author’s primary concern. Worried by signs of hereditary addiction—his daughter was experimenting with pot and his son looked to be a budding shopaholic—Nimoy approached their uncertain futures with caution, teaching himself to cultivate affection. Soon, his life spun into a new direction: He entered a writers workshop, accepted a job as a film-production teacher and began penning this memoir. Peppered with sophisticated jabs at Leonard Nimoy followed by “See, I’m a better father than you were” anecdotes, the book’s opening chapters bubble with angst. But this is no Daddy Dearest; the narrative brilliantly mirrors the author’s progression toward awareness. Initially riddled with unrelieved tension and unexpressed feelings, the prose becomes more expansive and reflective as Nimoy’s self-realization unfolds.
Touching, humorous and in the end wise account of how a Hollywood brat transcended lifelong resentment of his father by learning to accept without blame.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7257-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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