Showoff memoirs of an artist whose works stirred controversy during the Beat era and have been increasingly ignored ever since. Perhaps nostalgic for the days when he was regarded as the enfant terrible of painting, Rivers offers a reminiscence remarkable only for its tastelessness and lack of insight. Rivers recounts in numbing detail his sexual conquests (male and female), his halfhearted efforts to kick a heroin habit, and his self-proclaimed triumphs as a jazz hipster. He also discusses at length his problems with premature ejaculation and later with the adjustments necessary when his erect penis begins to look ``like a J-shaped sausage''—the result of a rare case of Peyronie's Syndrome. Meanwhile, Rivers's attitude toward women is porcine at best, and one of the unexplained mysteries here is just what his assorted wives and lovers seemingly found irresistible in his posturings. Many pages are devoted to Rivers's longtime relationship with Frank O'Hara, the early gay poet and ringmaster of the New York Abstract Expressionist circus. Here, the author displays a depth of feeling largely missing elsewhere. During a kind of summing-up, Rivers comes close to championing the proposition that women who have been raped probably were ``asking for it,'' though he is sensitive enough to admit ``that no one should be screwed against their will.'' Such aperáus aside, those interested in clues to Rivers's creative processes will be disappointed. From the evidence here, he seems to have had little, if any, cohesive artistic purpose. The kind of personal account that gives chutzpah a bad name. (Sixteen pages of color photographs—not seen; b&w illustrations throughout.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-019007-8
Page Count: 500
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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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