Southern-fried memoir heavy on the crispy batter but lacking juicy meat.
Chris Rock meets David Sedaris in this raucous debut about a crafty black youth coming of age in the South during the Reagan era.
Hadjii’s modern-day take on family life finds plenty of dysfunction in middle-class suburban Georgia, much of it self-imposed. Mundane inanities take center stage in his droll account of a mischievous, misunderstood childhood under the omniscient eye of his Bible-thumping, pimple-popping mother and Jeopardy-acing taskmaster father. Readers expecting to be regaled with tales of deprivation, drugs and drive-bys will be sorely disappointed, though hints of the Dirty South do arise in a chapter on “crusty draws” (his mother’s contemptuous words for his skid-marked underwear). This offbeat pastiche features tongue-in-cheek descriptions of school-sponsored craft fairs that contribute to his mother’s perennially expanding snow-globe collection, hastily written (and ignored) pleas to the Boogie Man to intervene during routine spankings, avant-garde adaptations of the church’s Easter play and the like. They’re all vividly rendered, but the book’s lack of narrative focus leaves it adrift. Whether illuminating the secrets of the “Negro Handbook” (recipes for potato salad and Jesse Jackson’s cell-phone number) or the health benefits of castor oil and garlic cloves, the conversational, confessional prose reads like an initially dynamic standup routine that quickly wears out its welcome. It’s often effective when the author employs dialogues structured as a dramatic script to underscore the differences between black and white culture on diverse topics from fast-food marketing campaigns to AIDS. But his approach misfires when Hadjii puts profanity-peppered vernacular in the mouths of inappropriate characters, among them a god-fearing woman and devout Oprah disciple. The final two chapters, which sharply accelerate the pace to take his story into the beginnings of adulthood, are oddly out of place in a book primarily concerned with detailing the myriad ways the author avoided disciplinary “ass-whuppins” as a youngster.
Southern-fried memoir heavy on the crispy batter but lacking juicy meat.Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2647-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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