A hilarious and touching coming-of-age story that will strike a particular nerve among Generation Y.
The former MTV VJ waxes nostalgic on his life in pop culture.
Writer, comedian, and TV personality Holmes, a writer-at-large for Esquire.com, is probably best known as the runner-up of MTV’s first Wanna Be a VJ contest, a competition he lost to the dervish known as Jesse Camp. The loss to Camp, which the author hilariously recounts with candid remarks about the victor, was a pivotal moment in Holmes’ life. He still earned a spot on MTV as an on-air personality, and the new career eventually led to a greater sense of self-acceptance that had eluded him his whole life. As a self-proclaimed outsider, Holmes’ burgeoning homosexuality as a teenager didn’t help his self-image considering his conservative upbringing in the Catholic community of suburban St. Louis. To help him cope, Holmes turned to pop culture. A cultural omnivore, he devoured the music his older brothers brought home from college, sang Top 40 songs with his parents, and watched a lot of TV. It wasn’t until a chance meeting with Amy and Emily of the Indigo Girls in his final year of college that Holmes finally received the advice he’d been longing for to help him come out: just trust yourself. Though Holmes peppers his narrative with witty asides and pop-culture references, the nostalgia factor is ramped up in the interludes between chapters, in which he provides a soundtrack for the current moment, a list of hunks that defined his adolescence, and the top 10 videos that defined MTV’s Total Request Live. One such aside is an amusing run-down of gossipy anecdotes of millennium-era pop stars and celebrities, featuring Kid Rock, Tara Reid, Puff Daddy, and more. Holmes is all charm, and his self-deprecating style makes his story relatable and engaging without feeling self-involved.
A hilarious and touching coming-of-age story that will strike a particular nerve among Generation Y.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-8798-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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