Parker follows a professor’s advice to “write it the same way you would tell it”—but his approach to the narrative,...
There’s an inspirational life story within this graphic memoir of a frequently incarcerated junkie who belatedly earned an MFA from Columbia University’s prestigious creative writing program, but the framing and pacing of the narrative fall short of the material’s potential.
A lifelong addict and petty criminal, Parker had been arrested more than 30 times before he started college in his mid-40s. He had some artistic ability—shown more here in his portraits of rock stars than his rough-hewn comics—and a lifelong love of reading and writing, despite a dysfunctional family in which he followed his mother down the path toward drugs and crime and most of his siblings ended up in jail or on the streets. His matter-of-fact tone has an honesty and dark humor to it, but the storytelling is so offhanded and chronologically disjointed that readers will sense that Parker is both smarter and a better writer than what he shows here. Particularly compelling are the parallels he draws between the penal system, academe and addiction. There is no typically redemptive arc to the story, as the author keeps circling back to addiction and prison. Even after he went straight and found praise for his writing at Columbia, he admits that his financial problems (exacerbated by his criminal record) left him with little remorse about cheating the system. “I still have larceny in my blood and am not afraid to use it should the need arise,” he writes, telling a fellow student, “I came here to write, not to teach or work like a dog in some damn restaurant for minimum wage.”
Parker follows a professor’s advice to “write it the same way you would tell it”—but his approach to the narrative, hopscotching from here to there and back again, isn’t nearly as powerful as the story he has to tell.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40662-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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