Bennahum’s debut is an autobiographical coming-of-age story, told eloquently through his relationship with computers. Bennahum, a contributing editor to Wired and Lingua Franca, digs through his memories of being an outsider throughout childhood, and details a fascination that began with his first Atari computer. The reflections are vivid and often provide cultural commentary on how the computer boom of the 1980s shaped a generation, and how kids— games like Space Invaders and Merlin broke the ground for today’s Internet age. Above all, Bennahum is an accomplished writer, both down-to-earth and inspiring, whether he’s describing the processes of a modem or the beguiling possibilities a child sees in an expansive white carpeted room. He consistently reaches into two of the most incomprehensible worlds (the mind of a computer and the mind of a little boy) and pulls out understandable and identifiable experiences. Bennahum is a storyteller for the kids who were born in the ’70s and grew up in the ’80s—the Atari generation. Adults nearing their 30s now who spent hours bootlegging software from BBSs, playing Pong and Breakout and comparing the merits of a Commodore 64 and a TRS-80 will find justification for and rejuvenation of their childhood fascination with those old boxy machines. Those who grew up alongside them will be rewarded with an insight into a cultural worldview that went largely unrecognized (and certainly unaccepted) because it belonged to kids, freethinkers, and crazy engineers. Just the sort of people Apple computers is applauding in their commercials today. In telling the story of the burgeoning computer culture, Bennahum winds up with a beautifully told story in which he comes to understand how his fascination with computers helped shape the way he thinks, the way he learns, and the way he copes. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-465-01235-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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