Engrossing, frightening and ultimately hopeful.
Broderick narrates his long, disastrous immersion in alcohol and drug abuse in this bruising but oddly entertaining memoir, limning scenes of sickening degradation with charm and humor.
The author, an Irish émigré, plunges the reader into the bleary secret society of erstwhile Emerald Islander construction workers. It’s a booze-filled, ultra-macho fraternity of stupefyingly hard drinkers who somehow manage to get through a day of hard labor despite crippling hangovers; drinking continuously on the job apparently dulls the pain a bit. An aspiring writer—unsurprisingly, Charles Bukowski is a particular inspiration—Broderick struggled to complete novels and short stories, dabbled with theater and ran a used bookshop in a touching attempt to join New York’s literary community. But answering the siren song of vodka and cocaine required the steady paycheck promised by construction work, and Broderick became caught in a nauseating cycle of blackouts, car crashes and violent encounters with drug dealers. His workmates were colorful, brawny Irish lads with livers of steel and a passion for partying and creative insults. Broderick cannily manages to convey the sheer fun of drinking to excess and living in a perpetual Bacchanal—his story would be infuriating and incomprehensible without this sense of blissful adventure—which makes the horrifying final stages of his rake’s progress all the more grim. The author’s voice is effortlessly engaging and funny, accounting for the unlikely bevy of beautiful young women helpless before his charms. His battle with the eponymous Orangutan, the personification of the inhuman thing that occupies his body while under the influence, also has a perverse buddy-comedy kick. Broderick does some yeoman reportage on the changing face of New York during the ’90s and ’00s, painting the city as a dangerously exciting playground irresistible to a certain species of self-destructive romantic.
Engrossing, frightening and ultimately hopeful.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-45340-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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