A finely written, painful, but profound book.
A former business executive tells the moving story of his rise from poverty to privilege and the secrets that haunted—and almost destroyed—his life.
Hart (Milding, 2004) met future wife Carly Simon on a chance train ride to New York City. He had not known who Simon was, only that he was profoundly attracted to her. A former seminarian, the author was a divorced insurance salesman and sober alcoholic with a mentally challenged son. His early life had been marred by the alcoholism and violence of a father whose “rages were as unpredictable as the Atlantic,” and Catholicism had been his refuge. Simon, by contrast, lived a glamorous life as a famous recording artist who had been married to singer James Taylor and romanced by countless other stars, as well as the daughter of Simon & Schuster co-founder Richard Simon. Despite their differences and the fact that the author, who bore a striking resemblance to Taylor, sometimes felt like a replacement for him, they married six months after they met. For Hart, the main challenge was acclimating to privilege and his sudden acquisition of the financial and emotional support he needed to pursue his dream of writing a novel. He soon discovered that his underlying attraction to men was also an issue, but one he could not face. Painful fissures appeared in his marriage to Simon and in his life; prescription painkillers, hookups with gay men, and crack cocaine became his modes of escape. Two decades after it began, his marriage ended, and he was forced to confront three painful truths: that he was an addict and homosexual who had failed the son he could not bring himself to love. In this searching, honest, and emotionally nuanced narrative, Hart navigates the struggle with his personal demons and the celebrity world with which he unexpectedly became enmeshed with elegance, grit, and artistry. The result is memoir that makes for exceptionally poignant, lyrical reading.
A finely written, painful, but profound book.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62778-214-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
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