A thoughtful, solidly researched biography of the wildly creative and iconoclastic yippie, portraying Hoffman as a fresh force in American political culture—and as a man ultimately sabotaged by bipolar disorder (manic-depression), which drove him to extremes and probably led to his suicide. In 1988, Jezer (the children's book Rachel Carson, 1978) ran into Hoffman in an airport. A veteran activist and countercultural journalist who'd known the famed radical from the early hippie days on the Lower East Side until the violent days on the streets of Chicago in 1968, Jezer embraced Hoffman and listened with growing unease as the time-battered yippie ranted on and on about how great everything was going. Hoffman would be dead the next year. From this almost Dostoyevskian image of a radical out of balance, consumed by his own raging misplaced energy (in this case, the hypomanic phase of bipolar disorder), Jezer traces Hoffman's early influences. From the time he was a middle-class Jewish teenager in Worcester, Mass., Hoffman loved to play the rebel street-fighting man. It was the famous humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, his professor at Brandeis, however, who inspired Hoffman to conceive of political protest as a positive expression, a means of self- actualization. In the ``Yippie!'' movement, founded with Jerry Rubin, Hoffman sought to fuse the creativity and individualism of the counterculture with the righteous spirit of the antiwar movement. Here, Hoffman appears as his own best creation—half Lenny Bruce, half political shaman, throwing cash off the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange, trying to levitate the Pentagon, proclaiming himself a member of the ``Woodstock Nation,'' not a place but a beautiful, free state of mind. Hoffman—and a whole doomed, inspired era—emerges vividly in this cleareyed, richly detailed work. (Photographs—24 pages b&w- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8135-1850-4
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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