A roaming, rambunctious account about rejecting society—and then embracing it.
A memoir discusses morality and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1980s punk scene.
One might not associate Salt Lake City with the counterculture, but in the mid-’80s, the city boasted a punk scene awash in drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. It was in this milieu that Bigelow (The Latter-day Saint Family Encyclopedia, 2019, etc.), fresh from high school, began to move beyond the good-and-evil morality of his upbringing by “middle-range Mormons.” Borrowing from the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons (Bigelow’s preferred means of escape during his early adolescence), the author adopted the philosophy of chaotic neutrality: “In D&D, neutral basically meant selfish—I did what I needed for my own comfort, but I didn’t hurt others for evil purposes, and I didn’t conform to some one-size-fits-all system of good.” What was so bad, after all, about casual sex, recreational drug use, and some minor theft here and there? Then, under the influence of LSD and Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand, Bigelow began to probe the unseen world—and he didn’t exactly like what he found. One night, after an INXS concert, drunk and on speed, the author suffered a strange encounter: a violent, angry attack that he called “a disturbance in the Force.” The experience forced Bigelow to confront a larger question: Did evil really exist? And was he better off as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints than as an unaligned hedonist? The author’s prose is conversational but steeped in its own cleverly outlined philosophy, as here where Bigelow describes the guilt he felt from stealing from his roommate: “After he left for work, we packed our stuff into cardboard boxes, including Scott’s combat boots and several records. If possible, we would’ve taken his TV, stereo, and other stuff too. As we drove north, I felt a little guilty. Had we crossed the line from chaotic neutral into chaotic evil?” While the author is an able storyteller with plenty of colorful anecdotes, his interest in morality provides a unique ballast in what would otherwise be a typical but entertaining tale of adolescent mischief. His evocative depiction of the time and its subcultures helps to make this a memorable and ultimately quite surprising autobiography.
A roaming, rambunctious account about rejecting society—and then embracing it.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9993472-3-2
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Zarahemla Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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