A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.
Tin House managing editor Knapp debuts with a collection of essays that attempt to balance highbrow and lowbrow elements.
In “Faces of Pain,” the author and a photographer attend a wrestling event held at the Portland Lion’s Club, where he “saw so many incredible things I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.” “Beirut” is an existential reflection on beer pong and the author’s frat-house 20s. “Mysteries We Live With” is an investigation into true-believer UFO subculture mixed with stories of the author’s own Christian upbringing. Most of the essays flow with self-deprecating charm, but Knapp often trips over his own wordiness and unnecessarily complicated verbiage. In the 90-page concluding essay, “Something’s Gotta Stick,” the author recounts his days at an adult skateboarding camp, lost in nostalgia while hunting for affirmation that would “clarify my relationship to my past, and, in so doing, help me lean into the future as if it were a headwind.” Knapp sees stories everywhere, committed to a belief that the lives around him are each their own unwritten memoirs. While a curious, self-conscious take on memoir, Knapp’s essays are often overwrought. The prolix “Neighborhood Watch” is a story of gentrification and the intersection of neighboring lives in the aftermath of a local man’s murder. The author ponders, again, “the vital and vivifying mystery” of life, that another person’s existence can be so different yet “so close to where the epic drama of your own life is set.” “Why can’t I get out of my own way?” he asks in one essay. “Seems I’m always getting caught in the sticky wicket of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story’s being told. Overaware that a story’s being told. My default mode tends to be this one of narration, meaning, roughly, that an experience doesn’t really become ‘real’ for me until it’s prosed.” These essays, often about trying to be stories we’re not, are carried by Knapp’s struggle toward self-acceptance.
A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6102-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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