Peregrinations of a curious, harmless sort that time has rendered largely irrelevant.
Eclectic, long-winded and occasionally diverting portraits by New Yorker staff writer Singer (Somewhere in America, 2004, etc.).
The quirkier the subject the better in this reporter’s book, although Singer is clearly not interested in his subjects per se but rather in what he unearths about them that will give him insider cachet. In the case of his tediously detailed study of the family-run vegetable farm in Del Mar, Calif., that supplies Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant, Singer’s well-connected attentions win him an invitation from the owners to attend their matriarch’s funeral back in Japan. “Secrets of the Magus,” a rather cloying profile of famous sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, merits reading for his in-the-know look at the craft and its historic practitioners. “Trump Solo,” written in 1997, ensures that the real-estate mogul comes off as a self-absorbed blowhard by nailing his “gaseous blather.” Singer likes Martin Scorsese a lot better, recording in “The Man Who Forgets Nothing” how “convincingly” the director repudiates his most graphically bloody depictions by declaring, “I’m not interested in violence that way anymore.” The most worthwhile pieces here are the portraits of less famous people involved in compelling pursuits, such as Richard Seiverling, organizer of the Tom Mix Festival, and international book collector Michael Zinman. “Mom Overboard!” offers 1996 cameos that now seem largely clichéd of overtaxed professional women on the mommy track. Occasionally, Singer’s recondite searches take him where few readers care to tread, as in “La Cabeza de Villa,” which recounts the Skull and Bones Society’s claim to have Pancho Villa’s skull in its Yale home. “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” delightfully treats a subject closer to home: deceased fellow New Yorker reporter Mitchell, author of Joe Gould’s Secret, whose “urban peregrinations . . . delineated a romantic quest, the trajectory of a polite but persistent intimate affection.”
Peregrinations of a curious, harmless sort that time has rendered largely irrelevant.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-19725-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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IN THE NEWS
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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