Cynical and endearing, Knipfel takes readers on an intensely cerebral wild ride.
With his knack for storytelling and knifelike humor, New York Press columnist Knipfel (Slackjaw, 1999) recounts the bizarre but agreeable months he spent in a locked-down psychiatric ward.
In 1987, after failing his most recent suicide attempt (by drug overdose) and spending three days in what he calls either a “psychotic break,” an extended hallucination, or hell, Knipfel awakes in an ICU hospital bed, tied down and “screaming Nietzche in rhyme.” At the time a philosophy graduate student, Knipfel half expects to “join the ranks of the visionaries who’d died in madhouses—like Artaud and the Marquis de Sade.” But he slowly regains a sense of his twisted self, descends six floors into the psychiatric ward, and then settles in, waiting to be deemed once again fit for the outside world. Soon, Knipfel gets to know his neighbors, finds that he likes “the bughouse,” and decides that sanity can be “distinctly overrated.” Constantly self-obsessed, he sees himself in many roles in the ward. He assumes the role of an anthropologist studying the “Bin” culture, considers himself a ward detective pondering questions that form a “conga-line” through his head, and tries acting as his own psychoanalyst. Reading and re-reading a single volume of Lacan (in part for lack of any other book), he concludes that he must study “Psycho Anal Lysis. The separation of the mind from the asshole.” Knipfel’s narrative is sharp and surreal, dark and melodic, and he mingles realism with vivid accounts of his three-day drug-induced episode. Throughout his account, the silence of the ward’s day room and the din of Knipfel’s fantastic imagination and disturbing memories combine in a sort of bipolar harmony.
Cynical and endearing, Knipfel takes readers on an intensely cerebral wild ride.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58542-027-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
