Conrad (Time Is All We Have, 1986) tries in vain to recapture the heady days at the San Francisco bar he opened in 1953 with the proceeds from his best-selling novel, Matador. Certainly, the era's jet set passed through El Matador's doors, but the stories Conrad tells about them range from dull to just plain silly. Jack Kerouac once sat at the bar and tried to repeat ``Freud's a fraud'' three times fast. Truman Capote tamed a ferocious bulldog by cradling it in his arms and murmuring ``Bulldog, bulldog.'' Lines or hijinks that might have seemed fresh at the time are now as stale as old crackers. John Ireland's joking response to the rumor that he was ``one of the ten best-endowed men in the world'' barely provokes a smile. And Ava Gardner's pouring a drink down a waiter's pants at Horcher's in Madrid is no longer the shockingly salacious act it must have been in its day. The only endearing factor here is democratic treatment; Conrad blithely reveals the foibles of the rich and famous, mostly the excessive drinking habits of people like Bing Crosby. (It is more than ironic that Conrad, whose last book was a memoir of his stint at the Betty Ford Center, tries to wring humor from drunken behavior.) In his introduction, Conrad mentions that he opened his bar with a Casablanca-like fantasy of meeting the woman of his dreams, even though he was married at the time; he ends with the story of ``The Girl'' who finally fulfilled the fantasy. Aside from these two references, the book follows no discernible logical path of organization, chronological or otherwise; it leaps from one banal reminiscence to the next. A breathless tone that is alternately society-page and frat-boy influenced (on Marilyn Monroe learning a dance step: ``When Marilyn bounced, everything bounced'') does not help matters. About as entertaining as a hangover. (12 line drawings, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-258507-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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