An unsparing, intimate reflection on the many ways money—or the lack thereof—can tear a family apart.
A frank memoir of money and the man.
Culture critic Siegel (Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence, 2015, etc.) incisively explores his modest New Jersey upbringing, exposing more deeply the personal history he shared in a June 2015 New York Times op-ed piece, in which he confessed to defaulting on his student loans. Reaching back to his pre-college struggles, the author recounts the bleak tale of his youth, growing up a budding intellectual drawn to writing amid a dysfunctional domestic scene. Siegel’s graceful opening description of the full moon shining like an “incandescent coin” subtly introduces the central role money played in the cataclysmic decline of the relationship between his failed jazz pianist father and unstable, “aspiring actress” mother, whom the author sees as driven together and, finally, apart by their “mutual vulnerability.” The title refers to the arrangement his father made with the real estate firm who employed him as an agent, whereby he was advanced a weekly salary against future commissions with the understanding it would be paid back. However, the more he “depended on the Draw to live, the more it shrank his life”—to the point that, when sales didn’t materialize, he eventually amassed a huge debt, which led to his firing, divorce, and having to declare bankruptcy while Siegel was in college. Thrust into ever more dire financial circumstances by his father and psychologically tortured by his mother, who “seemed to live for bitter emotional combat with everyone around her,” the author repeatedly endured humiliation in an attempt to support himself and get an education. Beautifully portraying his resulting masochistic “dedication to suffering” as akin to a “Buddhist monk on fire,” Siegel doesn’t hold back in baring his emotional scars. Though filled with moving introspection and insight, especially into the intangible ravages of poverty, the book may leave some readers wanting: if not for forgiveness or acceptance of the parental inadequacies he admirably bested, then at least the balm of forgetting.
An unsparing, intimate reflection on the many ways money—or the lack thereof—can tear a family apart.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-17805-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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