Stanhope offers good evidence that if our own families are messed up, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. Lively and...
In his first book, stand-up comedian Stanhope delivers a sympathetic though unenviable portrait of his multiply addicted, much troubled mother.
“After thirty-some years of ruthless drinking, it’s more than probable that I’ve fucked up a few details.” So run the author’s first words to readers, a warning that substance abuse and blue comedy are in the offing. Stanhope’s comedy, growing from the tradition of Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, is built on sharp political and social observations mixed with the insistence on shocking with details of drug abuse, sexual escapades, and the like. His book is no disappointment in any of these regards: there are dog genitalia (“touching a dog’s dick is gross, and your mother touching a dog’s dick is far grosser, and gross equals hilarious”), oxygen tents, crack, deathbeds, adultery, suicide, and sundry other things not often mentioned in polite company. Stanhope pokes fun at himself most of all as he recounts a wandering, messed-up youth doing crap jobs while learning comedy by trial and error until hitting on some universal truths—e.g., “farts are the funniest things in life, and if you disagree, then you have no soul.” Underneath the humor lies an affecting character study of the author’s late mother, who, for her manifold faults, was his fiercest defender and ally. The book is Stanhope’s often rueful record of trying to come to terms with her while reckoning with his own emotions and trying to build a career through a haze of his own making. “In my head,” he writes, “she was just a bad drunk who felt abandoned and didn’t have the patience to wait for me to sort shit out. If anything, I begrudged her for the timing.”
Stanhope offers good evidence that if our own families are messed up, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. Lively and smart and, in the manner of the best comedy, as sad as it is funny.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82439-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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