Not enough evidence of life here to warrant CPR.
A memoir from magazine writer Rose that tells us more about who she knows than who she is—and not much in either case.
The author comes out brandishing a knife and looking for trouble in her scant introduction: “People can come into my room if I invite them, but if they don’t like it they can get out fast, because it’s my room.” But as Rose begins her story, her prose goes lugubrious, and “get out fast” seems less like a challenge than a defense mechanism. The memoir maunders along in semi-torpor, detached and depressed as it describes a series of futility wars with hazy, sleep-in protectiveness, perhaps developed in response to her father’s cruel snideness. Rose does some modeling, takes acting classes, cobbles together some friends, all of whom in their 20s display a world-weariness that suggests the next move can only be into a bottle of Seconal. She drops names—always friends of friends or family, never hers—but Robert Hofstadter, John Reed, Tennessee Williams as portrayed here have no more resonance than photographs torn from magazines. When Rose scores a job at the New Yorker, she manages to perk up and wilt at the same time: for once she’s alert to her surroundings, but they give her the swoons, especially when filled with her gods: “Harold Brodkey, George Trow, and three whom I’ve come to think of as Europe, Personality Plus, and Mr. Normalcy . . . all of them were deeply engaged and seriously attracted”—wives notwithstanding. (Rose can’t be bothered with spouses either: “It can be a form of actual day-to-day torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison married people offer you. . . .”) What follows is a compendious, enervating catalogue of snappy responses and witticisms between her and the men, in and out of office and restaurants and bed.
Not enough evidence of life here to warrant CPR.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4124-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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