A hit.
A moving, absorbing journal of life on stage and at home.
A young (early 30s) veteran of stage (Rent) and screen (Adventures in Babysitting; A Beautiful Mind; the upcoming film adaptation of Rent), Rapp here makes an impressive debut as a writer, bringing a keen actor’s sense of detail, timing and pathos to the page. He opens with vivid descriptions of auditions, workshops and early performances of the musical Rent, with which he had become involved as an actor soon after its inception. His production log gaining momentum, he shifts abruptly yet skillfully to home in Joliet, Ill., where doctors discover a malignant tumor growing on his mother’s adrenal gland. Narratives entwine as Rapp reveals how his mother’s heartbreaking demise, his work in a major musical hit and his turbulent relationships with four men eventually, if painfully, empower his acting and enrich his life. Rapp sharply brings to life a series of inherently dramatic moments. There are the tumultuous performances of Rent, especially the one given for the parents and friends of Rent’s composer Jonathan Larson after Larson dies on the eve of the show’s explosive success. There are accounts of romantic yet tortured personal relationships. But most notably, there is the story of Rapp’s relationship with his mother. Clearly, mother and son had forged a bond after the mother divorced and as her son found work as a young actor. Still, their relationship remained tendentious, especially over the issue of Rapp’s homosexuality. Flying home on days off from Rent, Rapp eventually establishes touching rapport with his gravely ill mother. Writing with painful sensitivity of a final, wrenching farewell as he confronts her lifeless body, he reaches a deep, affecting level of personal expression.
A hit.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6976-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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