Black shows promising analytical skills for a young writer, but his book would have benefited from more emotionally...
In this short debut memoir of his first 30 years, Black candidly recounts his turbulent experiences as a young man learning to live with bipolar disorder.
As a child, the author lived in a perpetual state of transience. He painfully recalls being passed off by his drug-addicted mother to live with his caring but sometimes incompetent grandparents. School brought further trauma, as teachers, unable to deal with his particular temperaments, passed him off to the special needs class, despite his intellectual capacity. His outbursts would result in psychiatric hospitalizations, which he alternatively regarded as punishments or welcome vacations. Black shows great insight in explaining how his difficult experiences at home and school contributed to his trouble behaving in a socially appropriate manner. In other areas, however, this memoir is less sharp. The descriptions of women come from a distinctly male perspective, as they go into great detail about the physical attributes of everyone from young coeds to the author’s psychiatrist, about whom he writes, “Her jeans tugged tightly around her healthy legs, and a loosely buttoned shirt exposed perky brown cleavage.” Readers should also beware that these candid youthful recollections feature a brief incestuous relationship with a cousin, and some time the author spent sporting “Confederate shirts.” Black also writes about a torrid relationship that ended in domestic violence charges against him. At times, the narrative reads a bit like a school essay, with sentence openers such as “Needless to say…” However, as he’s a self-described “millennial,” Black’s story still has a way to go. His burgeoning introspection shows again in the final pages, and he offers valuable insights and very tangible advice to others living with bipolar disorder.
Black shows promising analytical skills for a young writer, but his book would have benefited from more emotionally revealing moments, and fewer objectifying descriptions of women.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bipolar Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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