by Eric Nuzum ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2007
Chatty, breezy and often hilarious: an enjoyable reminder that it’s best not to take things like the “blood-sucking undead”...
NPR contributor Nuzum (Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America, 2001) humorously sinks his teeth into the elusive, enshrouded world of vampirism.
He launches his quest for immersion in vampirism with a clumsy attempt to drink his own blood from a shot glass. Then he watches every vampire movie ever made—605 in all. Conclusion? “They suck.” Attempting “to understand what it means to be a vampire,” he spends a thankless weekend playing one in a local haunted house. At home in Washington, D.C., Nuzum conducts an unrevealing interview with a wily group of self-declared vampires initially contacted via Meetup.com. In California, a plucky guide who calls herself Countess Mina—“Mina Harker from the novel…turned into a vampire and then sent to San Francisco by Count Dracula himself”—energetically dispels “a lot of Hollywood’s lies” in her vampire-themed tours. Nuzum joins an eclectic group hosted by former child actor Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster on TV, for a trek through the ominous castles and monasteries of central Romania to discover the real history of torturous prince Vlad Dracula. Wife Katherine comes along on a brisk jaunt to England to view historic Highgate Cemetery and the significant Whitby Abbey. Less interesting are visits to the topless vampire revue Bite in Las Vegas and a party thrown by the curiously aloof “vampyre society of greater New York,” aka the Court of Lazarus. Nor do Nuzum’s frequent detours from bats and fangs to address issues like AIDS, bareback sex, Netflix, etc., really gel with all the blood facts, word origins and extensive meditations on Bram Stoker and his Dracula. Still, you have to admire a guy who adroitly plods through episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Dark Shadows convention, all the while disbursing such random footnotes as, “there never was anyone named Count Dracula.”
Chatty, breezy and often hilarious: an enjoyable reminder that it’s best not to take things like the “blood-sucking undead” too seriously.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37111-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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