A horrifying cautionary tale that reveals the vast dimensions of our vulnerability in the cyber age.
The story of a 30-something college student who employed an array of digital weapons to attack her writing professor, who loved her writing but rejected her amorous advances.
In a tale that sometimes seems more like a script for a horror film, novelist and short story writer Lasdun (It’s Beginning to Hurt, 2009, etc.) approaches his subject from a variety of perspectives. First, he provides a brisk narrative of the principal events: In the fall of 2003, he was a part-time teacher at a New York college (he changed the name); he greatly encouraged one of his students, an Iranian immigrant he calls Nasreen; after the course was over, they became email correspondents, and he helped her look for an agent and a publisher for her work; when her interest became more romantic, he backed off. And with her continued harassment, his hellish life commenced. Lasdun then pauses, returns to think about the classroom situation and to ask himself what he’d done—or not done—that might have contributed to this grievous misunderstanding. He looks for analogies (and solace) in literary works—among them Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which he summarizes at great length about a third of the way through, Macbeth, Strangers on a Train and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Penitent. Nasreen’s emails grew ever more crude and threatening (the author reproduces many of them), so Lasdun tried the FBI and the NYPD but with no real success. She posted vicious material on Amazon, Facebook and Wikipedia; she wrote to all of his publishers and to the institutions where he’d worked, accusing him of having sex with his students and stealing her material—even engineering her rape. She also forwarded in his name obnoxious and noxious material. A later section deals with Lasdun’s explorations of family roots and anti-Semitism.
A horrifying cautionary tale that reveals the vast dimensions of our vulnerability in the cyber age.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-21907-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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