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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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