The musings of one hot mess.
A fretful, cross-dressing underachiever recaps a lifetime of eccentricities.
At age 40, Goulian has had a busy life garnering a law degree and shuffling through a variety of odd jobs, though he admits to having little to show for it other than an uncanny sense of worldliness. His flashy chronicle begins in La Jolla, Calif., where his teen years consisted of a panicked obsession with an inguinal hernia, bowlegs, pristine teeth and, incredibly, a nose job at 15. Belly shirts, makeup and high heels became his typical dress code, a trait that “came naturally” to him but exasperated his parents and especially his grandfather, political philosopher Sidney Hook. But his androgyny became less of a worry for his family when compared with his personal defeatist philosophy (“I own nothing, and save nothing, and accomplish nothing tangible, and have no permanent hold on life whatsoever”). This resistance to constancy triggered a sudden disinterest in everything from soccer to the abandonment of his law career after attending Columbia University. Goulian writes of the comforting routine he discovered in almost a decade spent bodybuilding, but a stint at the New York Review of Books (to help defray the cost of purchasing a stuffed-animal collection) and clerking for a federal judge eventually lost their allure primarily because he “couldn’t wear the clothes” required of a professional job. A curiously insistent heterosexual, the author’s sassy, outspoken narrative gets kudos for its droll frankness, but it kicks and screams too much trying to be controversial. It’s a rambling story fueled by the author’s graphically described, awkward sexual foibles and misunderstood motivations. Flamboyant and creative? Definitely. But in a culture where few things are sacred, will anyone take notice?
The musings of one hot mess.Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6811-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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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