by Davy Rothbart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2012
Rothbart has admirable wit, but his sensitive-wiseacre persona gets repetitive.
A collection of personal essays by a man with a knack for stumbling into alcohol- and lust-fueled predicaments.
Rothbart (The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, 2005) is the creator of the fanzine Found Magazine, which features the provocative and poignant notes people leave in coffee shops and on sidewalks. On the evidence of these pieces, his life is similarly haphazard. In “Shade,” his pining for a woman who resembles a beloved movie character leads him to a long-distance relationship and a disastrous road trip. In “Tarantula,” a one-night stand ends with him in a swimming pool with a dead body. And in “What Are You Wearing?” a random caller becomes a regular phone-sex partner. In small doses, Rothbart’s say-yes-to-anything attitude and self-deprecating tone is entertaining and engaging. The best piece, “99 Bottles of Pee on the Wall,” tracks his obsession with a scam artist who runs a series of fraudulent literary contests; the slow burn of his outrage—and growing crush on a female author who got taken—is smartly paced, and he’s candid about his quixotic pursuit. But taken together, there’s an overall pattern to his responses that gives these essays an off-putting, manipulative aspect. Rothbart’s proclaimed modesty actually comes packaged in loads of hyperbole—every girl he falls for is the most beautiful girl in the room, every night was the most amazing night ever, every dumb drunken thing was the dumbest, most drunken thing he could have done. Such posturing makes the poignant tone of “New York, New York,” about a bus trip he took right after 9/11, feel engineered for emotional effect. And it makes a more serious work of reportage about a man he claims was wrongly convicted for murder less convincing than it should be.
Rothbart has admirable wit, but his sensitive-wiseacre persona gets repetitive.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-28084-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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