Strangely sad and triumphant—a highly contemplative but all-too-abrupt memoir.
Slate writer Neyfakh explores his complex relationship with an enigmatic underground rapper from Milwaukee who has spent the last decade in near obscurity, endlessly touring and producing a polarizing brand of hybrid hip-hop.
When he was just 15, the author briefly drifted into the otherworldly orbit of a white rapper with the unlikely name of Juiceboxxx. Continually dismissed by many as an inscrutable anomaly skittering somewhere on the outer edges of hip-hop culture, the high-octane artist known for his live performances nevertheless managed to turn the young Neyfakh into a steadfast, although often self-conscious, cheerleader. Fast-forward to New York City more than 10 years later, where Neyfakh—having shelved his own creative aspirations—had another chance to “link up” with Juiceboxxx in a journalistic attempt to figure out what continues to drive him—while also attempting to shed light on his own choices in life. Although these sporadic encounters before another bare-bones Juiceboxxx tour were brief, the themes that the exchanges engendered are broad: when is it time to abandon a dream? Who are you when that dream dies? Does conformity always kill artistic instinct? Nearing "the big 3-0," Neyfakh earnestly ponders these provocative questions and many more without ever hinting that either he or Juiceboxxx is getting any closer to finding the answers. The author's earlier attempts to advance the gospel of Juiceboxxx may have met with limited success, but here he succeeds, painting an intimate portrait of an intriguing and idiosyncratic artist whose inner angst is as sympathetic as it is compelling. The author does his job so well that the chronicle of his time in Juiceboxxx’s off-kilter “Thunder Zone” feels somewhat incomplete and could have benefited from a more developed back story focusing on the misunderstood rapper's earlier days.
Strangely sad and triumphant—a highly contemplative but all-too-abrupt memoir.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-446-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
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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