Fails to add anything transcendent to the canon of sexual-coming-of-age memoirs.
A real-life Alex Portnoy tells of a childhood penchant for masturbating in public.
The combination of comedic Jewish coming-of-age story and masturbation can’t help but conjure up images of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In Bayme’s debut memoir, the masturbation in question is done by a much younger lad and is a strange combination of introverted self-pleasuring and unintentional exhibitionism referred to as “rocking.” In fact, his first lustful encounter occurred at the age of 6, when he dreamed of tasting the scrumptious wares at his local Dunkin' Donuts, which was strictly forbidden by the edicts of his orthodox Jewish faith. “All I wanted were the simplest pleasures the world had to offer,” writes the author, “but life is unfair when you are a six-year-old Jewish boy.” Whether such statements are honest or ironic is anyone’s guess, but regardless, Bayme goes on to recall the childhood travails of a young kid from the Bronx who rubbed up against inanimate objects at school and at home. He then used pornography to prepare himself for hypothetical sexual contact with a girl. The humor is light and airy and rarely comes off as anything other than confessional dirty talk. “In my imagination,” he writes, “I was King Fuck, who charmed legions of women in the field and town squares before bedding many of them in my silk-festooned chambers.” Once he went as far as he could go with imaginary sexual encounters, in high school, Bayme finally obtained the girl of his dreams. He dropped her, however, when she couldn’t compete with his fantasies. After the first few chapters, the narrative begins to sound like every other boring recollection of growing up and experimenting with forbidden things like drugs and girlie magazines. The Jewish angle gives it some niche potential, but this is routine stuff.
Fails to add anything transcendent to the canon of sexual-coming-of-age memoirs.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06722-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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