Strobe light flashes of insight.
Alt-culture celeb Carver’s debut memoir asks: What comes next when you’ve lived more by the age of 20 then most people have in their whole lives?
Raised in a peripatetic manner by a Nietzschean drug-dealer father in California and an absent-minded mother in New Hampshire, the already high-strung author upshifted fast into mid-’80s adolescent freakdom. While still a teenager, she started a flirty correspondence with shock punk GG Allin and formed her own noise band, Suckdog. The first show featured a bass player and keyboardist who couldn’t play, a recording of the Bee Gees in the background and Carver ripping off her dress and screaming as she dove into the crowd of bikers and agro-punks, slapping faces at random. Over the next few years, she traveled the country with Suckdog, performing hostile, anti-art “operas” in basements and small clubs to negligible crowds, usually accompanied by her much older French husband (long story). It was all part of her inner burning, and an emptiness held at bay with movement, rage, shock: “If Suckdog isn’t good, at least we can make it unique.” Along the way Carver was a teen prostitute, occasional journalist and eventually the victim of an abusive relationship with a pseudo-celebrity neo-Nazi. In 1994, when their son Wolfgang was born with a chromosomal deletion that left him requiring constant care, she finally got off the life-as-performance-art merry-go-’round. Carver’s account is explosive, an X-ray of doomed souls and attention-seekers. “We try to get out of these cocoons and make our way down to where our bodies are. We try shoplifting and racist/sexist/ageist humor (trying to offend our way out); we get naked on stage. . . . We can’t get out. We can’t wake up.”
Strobe light flashes of insight.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-932360-94-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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