A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or...
Phillips gets writer’s block and ends up sucked into a chain of bad but lucrative businesses as he tries to figure out what to do with his life.
TV scripter Phillips had scads of talent, it seems, but little idea of how to apply it. The shambolic manner in which he tried to figure that out provides the grist for his memoir. Fresh out of the bucolic and positive-vibe-emitting environs of Marin County, Phillips published a roundly acclaimed novel (Tuscaloosa, 1994) at the ripe young age of 24. The expectations of further great work hamstrung his writing, and four years later he found himself depressed and on meds in Austin, struggling with “a doomed second novel.” Through a series of fortuitous personal connections leading via several degrees of separation to nascent South Park cartoonists Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Phillips wound up in California with a couple of friends, putting together a series of random cultural business ventures. They formed Certified Renegade American Product (CRAP) as an umbrella company to start ultra-indie film festivals that acted like self-proclaimed “barnacles” on the outskirts of Cannes and Sundance. They started a consulting business called Quiddity, a particularly ’90s entity that gave the spectacularly non-business-savvy Phillips and his coworkers the chance to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to formulate new names for companies or products. Not much came to fruition. The film festivals were just parties, and the businesses had little reason to exist; the author’s cynicism ballooned through the years of the Internet bubble. Phillips took a shot at acting in a porn film and made a short involving his penis. A feature idea that tried to merge Blair Witch–style POV filmmaking with Thomas Harris–like serial-killer profundity and millennial anxiety ultimately proved to be an exercise in sadism and colossal ego.
A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or self-reflective.Pub Date: March 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-7028-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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