May cause the reader to feel the need of a long hot shower.
A lackluster exposé of Latin superstar Trevi, her manager, and their sexual and professional misadventures with a troupe of very young wannabe pop stars.
Gloria Trevino (stage name: “Trevi”) always wanted to be a singer, and she got her shot when she was only 18 and paired up with producer Sergio Andrade. While Girl Trouble is ostensibly about the incredibly popular Trevi, it’s actually the story of this man, the master puppeteer who engineered the star’s success. Andrade trained Gloria, brought her to the public, then saw to it that her wild personality was packaged for maximum salability. Unfortunately for Trevino and dozens of other young girls, Andrade had a sadistic streak and an insatiable appetite for 13-year-olds. Once his reputation as a producer was established—and that was well before Trevino appeared—Andrade was able to recruit adolescent girls at will by promising a “performance scholarship” at his “special school.” McDougall reveals exactly what this means with a wealth of cringe-inducing examples ranging from auditions that required full-body physicals to the isolation of girls from their families—and that doesn’t even touch on the group sex. Andrade kept up the myth of a training academy for a remarkable period of time and married a series of teenaged brides, until one of them whose career never took off finally published a tell-all book about what was really going on. Why did the girls put up with it? Their extreme youth is the likeliest reason, although why their families accepted fishy circumstances is a harder call. McDougall, currently writer-at-large for Philadelphia magazine, dips into various studies of brainwashing in an effort to explain, possibly hoping to elevate the material out the realm of the purely sensational. But despite his extensive research and jailhouse interviews with both Andrade and Trevino, the work feels plodding—and overblessed with italics.
May cause the reader to feel the need of a long hot shower.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053662-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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