A disarmingly earnest portrait of an enigmatic figure.
The life and times of itinerant wanderer and vagabond extraordinaire David Pearlman, better known in some circles as Poppa Neutrino.
Longtime New Yorker contributor Wilkinson (Mr. Apology, 2003, etc.) writes about yet another creative eccentric. Early chapters are devoted to stories from Neutrino’s younger days, during which he engaged in fist fights in seedy bars; led a band of followers dubbed the “Salvation Navy” across the country while performing odd jobs to survive; and sailed across the Atlantic on a homemade raft in the company of his wife and two friends. The narrative is interspersed with the author’s interactions with Neutrino as well as their phone conversations. Among the highlights of their times together are visits to college and high-school football coaches to whom Neutrino attempts to pitch an idea that he believes will revolutionize football (it involves allowing quarterbacks and receivers to communicate during the action), as well as his attempt to build a new raft for a voyage across the Pacific. As the author points out, Neutrino is not necessarily the sort of man to draw the envy or admiration of others; much of his life has been spent struggling to survive generally self-imposed poverty. He is, however, an adaptable and intriguingly free spirit, determined to liberate himself from the constraints of the material world. Wilkinson sometimes spends too much time pontificating on the significance of his subject’s actions, but he makes up for it with his deft handling of dialogue and his talent for pacing.
A disarmingly earnest portrait of an enigmatic figure.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6543-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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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