A disappointing version of Sweeney's well-received one-woman, autobiographical show of the same name. Sweeney, best known as the androgynous character Pat on Saturday Night Live, was excited about living alone in her small L.A. home after an amicable divorce from her husband of five years. But when her younger brother Mike was diagnosed with advanced lymphoma in 1995, he moved in with her. Then Sweeney's parents followed suit. The three houseguests, along with Sweeney and her three cats, made quite a crowd in a house intended for one. Added to the fray were more family members and friends who popped in to visit the ailing Mike, as well as a brand-new boyfriend of Sweeney's named Carl, whose visit from out of town turned into a Catholic schoolgirl's dream of surreptitious sex behind the house after family dinners. (Amazingly, the two are still together.) Sweeney's tale of domestic woe is interspersed with the story of Mike's decline, his chemotherapy, and his eventual death. Also, Sweeney discovered toward the end of Mike's battle that she, too, had cancer—a treatable cervical cancer that necessitated a hysterectomy three days after Mike's death. This is sad, powerful material. Sweeney tells it here in a deadpan way that is never maudlin, but that is also, on the other hand, too terse to be emotionally satisfying. The same is true of the lighter moments: While there are events and characters that seem to have great comic potential (such as Sweeney's descriptions of her parents' idiosyncracies and her recollections of her career highlights and lowlights), that potential never seems to be fully realized. Occasionally touching but sadly flat. Something seems to have been lost in the translation from stage to page. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-10647-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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