If only Jacoby’s account of his career were as gripping as his heart-wrenching personal story.
The path from abandoned son to noted movie director.
Jacoby’s memoir begins with his mother being carted off, à la Blanche DuBois, to a mental ward. All the expected details of a vagabond childhood are here: foster-home pinball, stern social workers and the shroud of secrecy the boy felt forced to cast around himself. The one constant in his life was television. Jacoby’s talent for performance led him to NYU, where he became a cohort of Martin Scorsese (who provides an introduction) and worked odd television jobs. Through sheer will, the cast-off kid made a sexploitation flick, a personal indie film, and then . . . well, it’s unclear, really. Jacoby seems less than passionate about his creative products. His excitement lies in his telling of a destitute, unsupported boy who was able to make his way in the world. Readers too will be more moved by Jacoby’s flouting of the experts’ predictions that he would wind up “dead, on drugs, or in jail” than by the professional achievements he describes in rather dull terms. His triumph over adversity is certainly worthy of admiration, yet his memoir is ultimately frustrating, offering little payoff for slogging through passages of repetitive musings about his life philosophy (variations of “make it up as you go along”) and scattered, random details (for a filmmaker, Jacoby has a rather undeveloped sense of pacing). The author offers little information about his relationships with others and leaves no indication of where he is now; his final chapters seem like afterthoughts.
If only Jacoby’s account of his career were as gripping as his heart-wrenching personal story.Pub Date: March 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1711-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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