Important initial research into a writer—and a genre—in need of further serious attention. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
Moderately successful attempt to reconstruct the short life of a drug user, pusher, pimp, and felon who, upon his release from prison, penned 16 books (Whoreson, Never Die Alone, etc.) that fictionalized his criminal street life and sold millions of copies, mostly to urban African-Americans.
In his debut work, freelance journalist Allen has a daunting task. Little is known about Goines before his death at 37. In fact, when the novelist and the woman he was living with were gunned down execution-style in their Highland Park apartment in 1974, the Michigan police found virtually no evidence, and the case remains unsolved. In one of the most interesting sections here, Allen conducts his own informal investigation, interviewing, for example, one of the original homicide detectives, but can end only where the police did, with speculations and regrets. He begins with a preface revealing how he became acquainted with Goines’s work, opens the main narrative with the novelist’s grisly death, then leaps back to his childhood, education (meager), involvement in juvenile crime, enlistment in the Air Force at age 15 (he lied about his age), return to civilian (and criminal) life, incarcerations, and, finally, his discovery in prison that he had stories to tell—a lot of them. With his sister’s editorial help, buttressed by the generous efforts of his editors at Holloway House, Goines cranked out a swift series of streetwise crime novels that earned him many readers and some local celebrity. Allen’s prose is uneven. Sometimes he adopts the argot of his subject (“a pimp had to have it known at all times that he was in charge of his shit”); elsewhere the language is conventional and even clichéd. Excessively detailed summaries of such historical events as the Watts riots supply context for Goines’s life, but little else.
Important initial research into a writer—and a genre—in need of further serious attention. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-29124-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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