Slim—in every way.
Veteran film hand/hard drinker/coke sniffer/celebrity wannabe/Kerouac emulator/skydiver/Lakota sweat-lodger/adjunct undergraduate instructor Smith (English/Gettysburg Coll.) tells all.
He’d always wanted to be a writer, declares the first-time author; it just took him more than 50 years to get around to it. It seems longer in this salmagundi of a memoir. Smith chops up his myriad ingredients, stirs briskly, then invites us to reassemble them—which is not always easy. His father was an artist who seemed to understand the adolescent angst that caused Smith to drop out of Columbia, hitch around the country, take up skydiving, return to college and then wander into the movie business, where his long career as a key grip was perennially endangered by his alcoholism. The author once found himself naked outside his locked motel room on a balcony overlooking the parking lot. He nuzzled with Susan Sarandon and snorted coke with Treat Williams. Two marriages imploded (Smith is quite vague about the second), one of his children died (he writes oddly little about this), and so did his father. Nearing the end of his film career, he met a Lakota, decided he wanted to go on a vision quest and headed to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where he sweated and saw many ugly things that either were or were not there. Smith scatters about some tales about an intransigent snapping turtle (he’s sorry he killed it), a couple of films he worked on (Savages, Cop Land), a suicide he witnessed (the barefoot leaper made a bad sound when she landed), a couple of boyhood summers at camp (he cried the first night). Many sentences feature verbatim dialogue from a half-century ago and indulge in clichés of every sort: floodgates open; things fall into place. It all comes to an end with a second-person riff on Life.
Slim—in every way.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-05369-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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