Well-written and unspeakably sad, though often predictable.
A latter-day Thomas De Quincey who began “eating” when he was nine writes powerfully if repetitively about how drugs and alcohol destroyed his family and severely damaged him.
Novelist Brown (Lucky Town, 1994, etc.) here arranges in a broken chronology some previously published pieces and a few fresh ones, all of which are confessional and self-flagellant. The author drinks too much, snorts too much coke, smokes too much crack, fails to honor too many commitments; he steals and lies to his friends, to his wife, to his family, to—don’t be alarmed—himself! Hung over, Brown tries to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to undergraduates, who see right through him. He torments a pet pig he bought after a binge to dulcify his bitter wife; he’s annoyed because the porker acts, well, like a pig. He tries AA but is put off by too-patent piety. Brown’s brother and sister are both addicts and both commit suicide (he shoots himself, she leaps from a bridge); the writer crafts for each of them a very strong essay, imagining the moment of suicide in some of his loveliest, most wrenching prose. Brown’s mother was also an addict, and he recalls the time when, carrying along five-year-old James for a night out with Mommy, she torched an apartment building. An old woman died in the fire, but the cops had insufficient evidence to convict, so Mommy went away for tax evasion instead. (She had been surreptitiously selling family property to support her habits.) The Browns are no Cleavers, but their sorrows are delineated in captivating language. Brown knows the puissance of the present tense, effectively uses the second person (in the essay on his sister), crafts some heart-breaking sentences, and generally makes you want simultaneously to slap and embrace him.
Well-written and unspeakably sad, though often predictable.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052151-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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