The curiously disjointed memoirs of a conservative talk-radio host who created a national ruckus when he came out in late 1994 as a gay man with AIDS. Brudnoy, whose late-night show on Boston's WBZ-AM is broadcast to 38 states, grew up in Minneapolis, an only child in an extended Jewish family (including one uncle imprisoned for killing one of his dental patients). He spent a summer in Japan during high school and majored in Japanese studies at Yale, where he also had his first love affair with a man. After graduate studies at Harvard and another brief but serious gay relationship, the young Åber-liberal Brudnoy taught for two years at a black college in Houston at the height of the civil rights era. While there, he encountered the writings of Ayn Rand, which converted him in alarmingly short order to the conservative cause. Moving back to Boston, Brudnoy embarked on a prolific career as an essayist and reviewer for the National Review and other publications. In an intriguing parallel development, the author discovered a voracious fondness for psychedelic drugs, and apparently spent most of the '70s tripping his brains out while churning out commentary for William F. Buckley and Boston public television. As with many troubling facets of his life, Brudnoy accepts responsibility yet tosses off any attempt at understanding what motivated his actions. His concurrent drinking problem and failure since his Houston days to have any romantic relationships outside of bar pickups are similarly shrugged off. Brudnoy's devoted radio audience and his colleagues and friends offered tremendous support after he was stricken by AIDS two years ago; he itemizes their kindnesses while thoroughly recounting the harrowing specifics of his medical condition. While Brudnoy's fighting spirit in the face of AIDS is admirable, he fails to offer us a handle on what his various struggles have meant to him.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48276-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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