Strong writing from a talent that jelled in prison.
A cradle-to-jail, coming-of-age and going-bad autobiography from a bank robber out of the East LA barrio.
Debut author Loya was schooled in violence by a Bible-thumping, kid-thrashing, wife-beating, feckless father. Dad’s first wife, the author’s mother, “was twenty-six years old when she died,” he writes. “I was nine.” The paternal whippings finally ended when Joe attained manhood with one rash act: he stabbed his father. It wasn’t fatal, but Dad got the point. Joe shed a flimsy religious guise to become one hardcore hustler, challenging earthly and heavenly fathers. He favored hot cars, cool preppie vestments, and confrontations with all comers. An apostate, he trusted no one, betrayed no emotion, and lied easily. The route from The Church of the Open Door to the prison of barred gates began with bounced checks and progressed to grand theft auto, larceny, fraud, and bank heists. It was fun—until Joe got arrested and spent seven years in the slammer. Suspected of a jailhouse killing (the true murderer is not identified), he landed in solitary. His portrait of jailhouse life shows prisoners pitted against guards, against other inmates, and, ultimately, against themselves. A chance viewing of an Oprah segment prompts Loya to straighten himself out. It’s all a one-man show. This introspective Mexican Raskolnikov has become, as his sponsor, Richard Rodriguez, says in a foreword, “a theatrical.” He is wont to quote Nietzsche, Rilke, Marcus Aurelius, and other worthies—and, inevitably, the writing smacks somewhat of affectation. But against the odds, this felon’s drama is eventually compelling. The solipsistic title refers to an enormous fellow inmate as well as the author.
Strong writing from a talent that jelled in prison.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-050892-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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