Surprisingly readable, despite the author’s abundant disgust for himself and others.
Driven by a series of demons he’s eager to detail, debut memoirist Itzkoff lays bare the torments of his young, post-collegiate life as an aspiring editor in the testosterone-scented offices of men’s magazine publishers.
With his seething resentment, sexual desperation, and near-crippling insecurity, the author bears more than a passing resemblance to Philip Roth’s Portnoy. This time, however, our narrator’s Jewish mother is basically off the hook; it’s Dad who is the ultimate source of their son’s sufferings. Itzkoff bookends his coming-of-age tale with portraits of his father, a furrier who drowned disappointments in cocaine. When the story opens after Dave’s graduation from Princeton in 1998, Dad has retired to the New Jersey suburbs to drift around the house in his underwear; at its close, he has nearly died of a drug overdose. Meanwhile, his son, determined not to be this kind of man, is bouncing around the Manhattan offices of men’s magazines, first at Details, then Maxim. Working for these publications is less fulfilling that Itzkoff had imagined, however; full of loathing for himself and everyone around him, the author portrays his professional milieu as a waking nightmare of puerile torment and emotional distance. Offering plenty of dirt for those interested in four-year-old magazine gossip, the author isn’t shy about describing the debauchery and flawed human relations that were the rule in his places of employ. In fact, he isn’t shy about describing anything, including his difficulties with relationships, his various bouts of drug use, and the very specific details of an unpleasant session with a prostitute. At every possible moment, Itzkoff shoehorns in self-deprecating Jewish slurs, mentioning his high-school nose job at least twice. Taken as a whole, however, the author’s tale has a not-unappealing nervous energy, and his jumpy, edgy prose will probably keep readers turning the pages.
Surprisingly readable, despite the author’s abundant disgust for himself and others.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6113-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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