Indiana remarks that his memories are “colored by mood and contingency.” The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter,...
A writer, filmmaker, playwright, and artist recalls his past.
In this ironically titled memoir, Indiana (Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, 2010, etc.) gives little evidence of love but much graphic detail of sex, focused often on comparative penis sizes and tumescence. Although he claims to have “an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance,” being “too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone’s life, including my own,” his voice throughout tends to be supercilious. Indiana characterizes his parents as “emotionally constipated,” creating an environment that prepared him “for absolutely nothing.” Growing up within “a swamp of human wreckage tainted by alcohol,” any problem, he was taught, “was other people’s fault.” Early sexual experiences with boys left him believing that “sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality.” In his 20s, he was subject to panic attacks and depression; pickups did not fulfill his “pinching wish for attachment.” In late-1960s California, Indiana “lived on no money, with no fixed address, becoming a ward of whatever boyfriend or commune whose orbit I drifted into,” usually connected to his friend Ferd, a political activist and porno filmmaker. In those years, writes the author, psychedelic drugs “were taken like aspirin…and heroin users were seen as the truly daring souls, more ‘seriously’ troubled than aimless run-of-the-mill LSD dropouts.” Ferd often sent him to emergency rooms to steal syringes, errands he performed with alacrity. Later, living in Cuba, the author had an affair—“a complete pornographic fantasy”—with a sexually energetic deaf mute, a relationship he quickly found “tiresome.” Among those singled out for scorn is Susan Sontag: arrogant, “exasperating,” a woman whose “chronic aesthetic gourmandizing filled her with a histrionic rapture that required live witnesses.” David Lynch was humorless, boring, and “smarmy.”
Indiana remarks that his memories are “colored by mood and contingency.” The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter, and sad.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4686-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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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