A story and character that’s already been fictionalized—with a good deal more compassion—in the TV show Californication.
Reality-show producer Wieder plays bachelor and details the ensuing spiral of shame.
His memoir opens with the author tugging and pulling at himself in what are later revealed to be a series of PE—as he truncates Penis Enhancement—exercises. In February 2005 (the Year of the Rooster on the Chinese calendar), the author left his wife to seek the life of a swinging single. “Los Angeles is of course a town acrawl with sexy young women,” he writes, “even the least desperate of whom I felt confident I could lure home to my tastefully decorated future bachelor pad.” Wieder encountered his first stumbling block when it became clear that his best friend was heading to the altar, and thus would be unavailable as his dedicated wingman. “[A]s off-the-leash and totally committed as I was to getting sloppy laid,” he writes, “I knew how potent our combined mack would be.” Yet he persevered, setting up three dates with three different women over three consecutive nights for his second full weekend of “bachelorhood.” Though Wieder claims to have exhibited genius-level smarts in childhood aptitude testing and occasionally drops references to things like poststructuralist texts, the majority of the narrative is dedicated to celebrating his outright decadence and the “many women [he] hoped and planned to fuck.” Just when he thought he was “so fucking set,” he had an existential crisis, spurred by the Internet release of a sex tape featuring Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. After years of producing shows that humiliated participants for ratings, Wieder—upon hearing Durst’s penis described as small and then comparing sizes—felt an emotion he “couldn’t identify at first” (turned out to be shame). The author then proceeds to describe his pathologically addictive behavior regarding PE.
A story and character that’s already been fictionalized—with a good deal more compassion—in the TV show Californication.Pub Date: July 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-58216-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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