Grippingly provocative reading.
An award-winning journalist tells the story of one man’s struggle with a rare form of bipolar disorder called the Truman Show delusion.
Kevin Hall had it all: intelligence, money, and good looks as well as a deep love of sailing, a sport that defined his identity from boyhood. Hall excelled in school and, under the guidance of his hard-driving father, won many prestigious sailing awards. He then went to Brown University, where he double majored in math and French literature and also qualified to train with U.S. Sailing Team coaches. During his junior year, Hall suffered the first of many psychotic breaks. He also became aware of “The Director,” an illness-born figure that pressed him to do anything from travel out of town to walk into ongoing traffic for “The Show,” an imaginary reality TV broadcast intended for a worldwide audience. Hall finished college but not without facing more demands from the Director, encounters with the police, and stints in mental hospitals. Back home in California, he continued to train with the idea of one day fulfilling his Olympic dreams. Hall also battled to stay on medications he hated and overcome testicular cancer. He eventually married his college girlfriend, made the America’s Cup Team, and participated in the 2004 Athens Olympics, where he finished 11th. Yet, as journalist Pilon (The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, 2015) ably shows, every triumph was laced with struggle and feelings of monumental failure. He also faced the stern judgment of a father who believed his son was not trying hard enough to overcome his illness. After one especially bad manic episode, the elder Hall told his son he had “wasted time and hard-earned money to be part of Kevin’s indulgence.” The narrative, which is interspersed throughout with photos, interviews, and excerpts from Hall’s journals, reads like an in-depth character study of a morbidly delusional man. As it journeys through Hall’s illness, it also forces readers to consider the “sanity” of their own relationship to a media-saturated world.
Grippingly provocative reading.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-682-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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