Trying hard to be a Beat, but without the brains. He even spent time with Allen Ginsberg, to no discernible effect. (photos)
A scattershot, unmulled memoir—startling in its casual violence and voracious intoxication—from a New York City badboy who doesn’t seem terribly concerned about the trouble he left in his wake.
The story is a bit overmuch, this life that seems to have been left in the hands of some mad autopilot, for Montiel rarely appears to be in charge. After the booze and girls and drugs and fights, the minor flash of celebrity and endless haul through nights of one debauch or another—“It was an insane wild terrific night,” he’ll say time and again, though getting fried and staying up until dawn may not be everyone’s idea of a terrific night—he never stops to wonder what the point was. But perhaps it’s easier not to have a point (how else to explain this “perfect moment”: “I took three blows, two to the head and one across my face by a Puerto Rican with a baseball bat on Steinway Street and felt like a man for some crazy reason”), or maybe that’s just how they raise them in Astoria, Queens. Or maybe not: his father comes across as fairly caring and attentive, even if the glimpses we get of him are stream-of-consciousness noodlings about his tastes in local TV news, or that “one of my fondest memories of my father unfortunately involves an accordion.” The brawls and cruel pranks and nonstop mind-bending are Montiel’s alone, and it gets tedious. His friends may be loyal, but they get a clichéd hack job: “Jimmy taught me to be tougher that the toughest. To be real. To be true.” Real and true to what?
Trying hard to be a Beat, but without the brains. He even spent time with Allen Ginsberg, to no discernible effect. (photos)Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-474-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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