A readable exposé that feels like an article-length topic overstretched into a book.
In this nonfiction debut, New Jerseyite and former frat brother Lohse blows the whistle on the distasteful hazing practices he witnessed during his tumultuous time at prestigious Ivy League institution Dartmouth College.
The author comes off like your average middle-class, all-American lad, with good grades and a fair amount of potential in life after leading his high school’s Model United Nations and graduating with honors. Even so, to live the Ivy League dream, he was reduced to getting his Dartmouth-educated grandfather to help him in his quest to be “reconsidered” by the admissions officers. Being insecure and desperate for acceptance, Lohse figured the easiest thing to do would be to join the most notorious fraternity on campus. Little did he know that his stint as a Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge would nearly ruin his life. The author soon found himself in a socially poisonous environment in which he was forced to guzzle vinegar, Mad Dog 20/20 and even cups of urine. Other mandatory activities in this phony ritualistic ascent to brotherhood included wading in a pool of human excrement, games of blackout-drunk beer pong and even the chance to snort cocaine while listening to Eric Clapton’s song about cocaine. Eventually, his flirtation with the drug got him in trouble with the cops. Lohse’s writing is passable but also peppered with annoying frat slang (he frequently employs the term “boot” as a verb meaning “to vomit”) and awkward metaphors and similes (“Summer was long gone, though—it had faded out like washed out salmon pink shorts”). The author’s story might be more sympathetic had he not eventually decided to haze pledges himself before ratting on his “bros” to Rolling Stone.
A readable exposé that feels like an article-length topic overstretched into a book.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03367-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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