A collection of solid archival material for a better book.
A memoir about the 1960s that reflects the slapdash spirit of that decade’s underground press.
Sanders is a writer of renown and accomplishment—a published poet, author of prize-winning short stories and a controversial account of the Manson Family murders (The Family, 1971)—yet this hodge-podge shows little evidence of such craft. Instead it functions more like an annotated diary, with entries by topic or date rarely longer than a couple of paragraphs, padded with illustrations that function more as historical artifacts than art. Sanders had his fingers in many of lower Manhattan’s counter-cultural pies: He published a mimeographed arts journal with an obscene name, ran an alternative bookstore, helped to found the notorious Yippie anti-party and “levitate” the Pentagon and proselytized for legalized marijuana and mass fornication in the streets. But he remains best known for fronting the Fugs, a notorious rock band of politically minded poets who landed a major-label contract and (amazingly enough) earned Sanders the cover of Life magazine and spots on national TV. The most extended and hilariously engaging part of the book is a transcript from William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, with Sanders joining the conservative host, a clueless academic, and Jack Kerouac, who had become an alcoholic reactionary, in a discussion that Buckley introduced with, “Our topic tonight is the Hippies, the understanding of which we must, I guess, acquire or die painfully.” The entire program was a joke that only Sanders and occasionally Kerouac seemed to get. The matter-of-fact tone through much of the narrative makes it difficult to distinguish satire from delusion. Of the Fugs, he writes, “Some of the songs on our second album are not what is currently known as PC, or politically correct, and we might not now write them in quite the same way, but they were true to the testosterone-crazed era in which they were created.” One might say the same about the book, except that it was written now, about then.
A collection of solid archival material for a better book.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81888-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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