Largely pleasant and forgettable, an agreeable-enough diversion lacking in lasting impact.
Comedian and musician Hill delivers a moderately amusing memoir in this collection of comic essays.
The narrative lacks any sort of outsize hook. The author’s tenure on the lower rungs of show business is without scandal, his suburban upbringing seems to have been largely free from trauma and his work and romantic histories are fairly mundane. This leaves Hill’s voice as the sole point of interest, and the author’s wryness is engaging in small doses, but over the long haul the relentless self-deprecation and undercutting of dramatic expectations are wearying. Hill writes about his adolescent hockey career, his time in various rock bands, frustrations with family and girlfriends and other picayune subjects with an unvarying, low-watt comedic rhythm. The pieces are well-observed and deftly rendered, but they never build to anything greater than a good anecdote or a handful of clever lines; they lack strangeness and surprise, the bracingly fresh perspective of an essay by David Sedaris or Jonathan Ames. Hill is a thoroughly conventional “dude,” and, while a fairly witty one, his stories and presentation lack a distinctive flavor. The most memorable pieces deal with his struggle with depression, which he describes with admirable clarity, and an account of his stint working at a homeless shelter, which is enlivened by vividly outrageous characters and an insider’s look at the practical aspects of administrating at an institution that will be unfamiliar to most.
Largely pleasant and forgettable, an agreeable-enough diversion lacking in lasting impact.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00203-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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