Fast-paced and fun, but rambles too much for its own good.
Biker rides, deals drugs, goes to Vegas, repeats.
When co-author Gardner was researching her novel Salvation Run, she started hanging out in a St. Paul motorcycle shop where she kept hearing stories about Richard “Deadeye” Hayes, local legend and noted raconteur. After they finally met up, she decided to help him write his life story, and it’s easy to understand why. His autobiography is nothing if not colorful, from the moment this compulsively anti-authoritarian kid started using drugs in the 1960s. Portrayed here as a film-worthy antihero, Hayes survived many violent confrontations over the years, including a couple of shootings—ironically, it was accidental gunfire that cost him his eye and won him his nickname. Profane and temperamental, but with a yen for prankish humor, a soft streak a mile wide and a deep supply of worldly wisdom to draw from, Hayes comes across as an likable guy who just happens to ride with the Los Valientes bikers and to have made and lost a few fortunes over the years dealing drugs, mainly methamphetamines. Where he and Gardner get into trouble is with the book’s loose-limbed structure, which sometimes gives off the pleasant aftereffect of a boozy conversation with a genial stranger, but more often seems like little more than a randomly linked listing of and thens. While this approach has its merits—unlike most narrators, Hayes can get away with starting a paragraph, “Then there was the time I got stabbed in the stomach”—it loses its appeal well before sputtering to a conclusion.
Fast-paced and fun, but rambles too much for its own good.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8065-2899-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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