Personal reminiscence, literary analysis, biography, and historical overview: this volume throws every critical tool possible at its protagonists—the Beat triumvirate of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac—only to produce a mishmash of sycophantic praise and endless personal anecdote. The opening vignette of Paradise Outlaws combines a polemic against the tenets of New Criticism with a eulogy to a king setter named Shantih, and such a bizarre conflation of ideas sets the tone for a book undermined at every turn by its lack of focus. Tytell’s exuberance offers only obvious insights into his subjects’ otherwise fascinating lives, including such banalities as how the Beats rejected the values of America’s Puritan heritage and felt stifled by the rampant conformity of the 1950s. The real hero of Paradise Outlaws seems to be Tytell himself: he desperately wants his readers to know that he was personally acquainted with these writers. Unfortunately, Tytell appears to be merely the Kato Kaelin of the Beat circle, always there at the right moment to be caught in a photograph. Nevertheless, the authorial presence thus destroys the objectivity needed to explore the work of his beloved friends. The main personal photographs of the Beats and their circle, taken by Tytell’s wife, Mellon, contribute the book’s only remarkable feature. Raw with candor and spontaneity, the pictures capture the men and their world in moments of sparkling clarity; such photos as one of Burroughs standing in his nattiest attire before a noose and Ginsberg sitting in his Cherry Valley, N.Y., kitchen capture their subjects in rare and personal moments. With so many wonderful photographs of the Beats and the people who shared their countercultural world, Paradise Outlaws could have been a great coffee-table book, if only it had been envisioned as such.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16443-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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
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