An uneven combination of songs and prose that reflect lessons many self-help fans would appreciate.
Memoir of a substance-abusing singer-songwriter reveal a harrowing path to self-acceptance.
Poppy started his life tenuously. Born the last child to a mother who was warned not to have another, doctors waited on standby to perform a complete blood transfusion on the newborn. Poppy avoided the operation just as he has ducked the many threats to his life since, including a cliff-dangling car accident, a head injury that left him unconscious for two days with maggots tunneling into his wound, dementia and alcoholism. A singer-songwriter, Poppy begins with the lyrics to a song–a total of 28 compositions are interwoven throughout 13 chapters that chronicle the author’s unsteady journey. All the songs are included on a two CD set that accompanies the book. Using a pleasant, country-western-tinged voice to croon melodic tales of love and life, Poppy proves to be a much better singer than writer. His smooth tenor evokes emotions that are buried in his clunky, elementary prose. Songs such as “Shaky Ground,” with the lyrics “walking around on solid ground/the soles of my feet feeling every pebble / seems like I’m always on the decline winning life’s uphill battle,” neatly illustrate core issues that take him several chapters to tediously explain. Despite many grammatical and spelling problems, the essence of Poppy’s triumph over a cycle of abuse and destruction shines through. Saddled with an abusive alcoholic father, the author gradually repeats the pattern laid out for him until winding up a homeless drunk. Plagued by dementia and three ex-wives, Poppy enters psychiatric rehab though adult-protective services. In an attempt to break free of his stifled life, he heads to Amsterdam and starts writing poetry. There, the creatively energized Poppy enters a songwriting contest and garners first runner-up. This, along with the pride he feels for the accomplishments of his daughter, are the simple joys of his life. Although filled with many instances of sadness and pain, there are few traces of regret or bitterness in Poppy’s account. He’s grateful for life itself, and his sincerity overshadows the limits of his writing.
An uneven combination of songs and prose that reflect lessons many self-help fans would appreciate.Pub Date: June 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8244-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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