Low-key, modest pleasures.
Observant, compassionate collection of newspaper pieces exploring America’s odd corners.
Oklahoman Stuever, now a Washington Post Style section writer, having reported from locales including LA, Albuquerque, and Austin, describes his beat of defunct malls, K-Marts, and sci-fi conventions as “Elsewhere . . . the kind of world where I look for ideas, for joy and loss and the marginal things, the funny quirks of what is bland and true.” The 26 essays and profiles here range from offbeat consumer studies to artful deconstructions of common rituals, all of them underpinned by notes of angst, isolation, and millennial fearfulness. The self-deprecating author (“I got lost a lot . . . and I was not terribly cool”) proves adept at fly-on-the-wall reportage, insinuating himself into the lives of quirky or mildly desperate individuals without imposing his own personality on their situations. Many essays find a starting point in pop-culture phenomena: “Panic Rooms,” for example, depicts the cable TV show Trading Spaces’ Darwinian effect on two home-owning strivers in Plano, Texas, who submit to its redecorating schemes. “The Josie Problem” and “Wonder Woman’s Powers” look at the histories, creators, and strange commercial afterlives of a TV show and a comic-book series that both present oddball visions of female empowerment and are beloved by gay men. Some pieces were clearly written in response to current events: “Recallifornia” finds an ideal metaphor for that state’s troubled gubernatorial process in the lonely, cynical, yet indefatigable person of Gary Coleman, while “Evil Queens” reminds us of Richard Hatch, the Survivor schemer we loved to hate. “Modern Bride” is a detailed yet ambiguous take on a mid-sized wedding thrown by a middle-class Hispanic family. The best essays—a piece on storage-unit culture and a haunting personalization of the Oklahoma City bombing—dig deeper into our domestic isolation and wanderlust. Stuever’s work recalls that of David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs (who provides a blurb), but it’s generally sweeter and less biting.
Low-key, modest pleasures.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7573-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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