A warm, witty portrait of a quietly extraordinary American life.
Lowbrow TV-actor-turned-congressman relates his strange life and times.
No, it’s not Sonny Bono, or even Fred Grandy. Surely no one was clamoring for a memoir from Jones, semi-famous for portraying the begrimed mechanic “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazzard before serving two terms as a Democratic U.S. congressman from Georgia. So this modest tome is a pleasant surprise, as he relates the events of his unlikely life with appealingly low-key charm and easy humor. Born in crushing poverty to an alcoholic railroad man and his defeated wife, the author grew up in a shack in Virginia, following in his dissolute father’s footsteps while racking up failed marriages and stints in jail. But he yearned for something better, haphazardly cultivating an interest in literature and theater between blackouts, eventually finding sobriety and gainful employment maintaining the Duke boys’ General Lee on network television. Jones’s account of his dark years is perhaps too restrained; he alludes to various categories of bad behavior and leaves it at that. The book really picks up steam with his post-Dukes congressional career, a development that surprised Jones as much as anyone. He dishes freely, delightedly reporting on the crookedness and venality of the party machinery that opposed him. The case for campaign-finance reform has seldom been made so entertainingly as in his account of an underfunded and idealistic outsider running afoul of institutionalized graft, corruption and hypocrisy. (Newt Gingrich won’t be providing a blurb.) A late highlight of the narrative is Jones’s trip to Tiananmen Square, where he violated diplomatic protocol and staged a small protest in the name of the murdered student protestors, infuriating the Chinese brass. That gesture sums up his public life: small-scale, sincere and sympathetic to the little guy. Jones currently curates a phenomenally successful annual Dukes of Hazzard fan festival at which “Crazy Cooter” remains a major draw. God bless America.
A warm, witty portrait of a quietly extraordinary American life.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39527-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
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