A gritty, melancholy memoir leavened by the author’s amiable, engrossing narrative tenor.
The journey of a teenaged theater-school dropout enticed into traveling to Southeast Asia to be a “harem girl.”
Christened “Mariah” by her ballerina birth mother, the author was renamed “Jillian” by her Jewish adoptive parents who acquired her through an illegal “gray-market” transaction. A rocky childhood in suburban New Jersey was followed by a hardscrabble tenure in Manhattan after the author abandoned a New York University education, opting instead for the “proverbial school of life.” Desperate for cash, she exchanged waitressing for stripping, then began escorting for a madam. In the early 1990s, a lucrative offer to “amuse a rich businessman in Singapore” seemed too good to pass up, and it was revealed that the job was really with Prince Jefri (nicknamed “Robin”) of the affluent Brunei royal family. Eager to be relieved of her East Coast “bohemian mantle,” Lauren abandoned a loving boyfriend and her hospitalized father to embrace an “alarming recklessness,” flying to Singapore with only $30, which she spent on a cab to the airport. Together with “Destiny,” another girl chosen from the interviews, Lauren arrived at a high-walled palace, was stripped of her passport and embarked on a life of endless late-night parties populated by beautiful, multicultural and highly competitive women. Crash courses on etiquette, bowing, Muslim customs and basic subservient behavior ensued, all preparing her for the brilliance and ease of an opulent lifestyle with playboy prince Robin. After extending her stay, however, depression, homesickness and harsh reality sent her back to New York, where an unwelcome pregnancy spurred a fruitless search for her birth mother, along with a few shocking twists. Lauren, who considers singer Patti Smith “the barometer of all things cool and right,” is a deft storyteller, imparting equal parts poignant reflection and wisdom into her enlightening book.
A gritty, melancholy memoir leavened by the author’s amiable, engrossing narrative tenor.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-452-29631-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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