by John Du Cane ; illustrated by Judit Tondora ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2020
An absorbing memoir perfectly complemented by exquisite art.
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In this autobiography, a man recounts his turbulent life—from his immersion in the 1960s and ’70s drug culture to his more serene practice of Chinese qi gong.
Du Cane’s (Wild Boy, 2017, etc.) account comes in the form of short stories or anecdotes. As the author divides them by topic (drugs, accidents, etc.), they’re not chronological but are easy to follow. The author’s life got off to a rocky start, as his umbilical cord nearly strangled him. He recounts this with his recurrent, understated humor, noting his mother’s claim decades later that baby John “gave her a furious, accusatory glare.” Throughout his teens and 20s, Du Cane was a movie critic and filmmaker and regularly in the company of musicians or artists from the underground cinema. He also dabbled in drugs, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not, such as the time someone spiked his tea with acid. Later in life, he sought enlightenment in India, became a tai chi practitioner, and attended or organized qi gong retreats. The author, in the book’s final section, rather fittingly discusses deaths, particularly those of his parents. His collection of tales ranges from unsettling (a friend’s blasé murder confession) to humorous (Du Cane invested in Christmas Evil, a holiday-themed horror film, and, years later, mistakenly believed 1985’s Silent Night, Deadly Night was the result). Some of the recollections are even endearing. One instance stemmed from the author’s review of a movie featuring a killer “dwarf.” The actor who portrayed the character angrily confronted Du Cane about his apparently insensitive phrasing only for the two to share a friendly drink afterward. This is a refurbished version of the author’s earlier Wild Boy book, this time bolstered by debut illustrator Tondora’s vibrant artwork. As a writer, Du Cane is concise, resulting in brief stories and an overall succinct memoir. His smooth, frank prose is engaging: “I am at best a poorish windsurfer, with scant skills and not much nautical sense to back it up. So, when the tides and the sudden gusts conspired to strand me far from the rocky shore, I ended up dismasting, lying on the board and paddling.” Accordingly, he neither condemns nor condones his occasional illicit behavior but rather allows his experiences to speak for themselves. For example, as a teenager, he smoked dope with strangers and became violently ill. During his stupor, one man raped him until Du Cane managed to flee, left with a lingering sense of vulnerability. The illustrations accompanying certain stories are striking and indelible. While some are graphic-novel style, others veer in entirely different directions. In the case of Du Cane’s birth, Tondora’s work is convincingly akin to Japanese erotic art while an image spotlighting Lou Reed resembles stained glass. Perhaps her most superlative effort here is the pastel-shaded, psychedelic rendering of Du Cane’s tale of a staggering, possibly hallucinogenic cocaine episode. The book’s potent design, which packs the pages with collages, often incorporates both the author’s words and Tondora’s pictures, showcasing the solid fusion of the two.
An absorbing memoir perfectly complemented by exquisite art.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73419-440-1
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Du Cane Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Du Cane
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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by Jon Krakauer
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by Jon Krakauer
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by Jon Krakauer
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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