A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want...
Mix David Foster Wallace with Patti Smith, Augusten Burroughs, and Karen Finley, throw in powders and pills, stuff it in a deep-dish pizza box, and you’re in the territory of compulsive blogger Boyle’s post-postmodern blockbuster.
“Feel like I’m about to vomit and I’m being watched and my execution is soon.” So writes sometime Vice columnist Boyle toward the end of this long, loping hyperextension of the “quantified self” or life-logging movement, by which every thought, every detail, every meal, every bed-wetting, every kiss, every bowel movement, every drink, every drug over the year 2013 gets recorded, “everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability.” Oh, are there drugs and drinks, and oh are there all those other things, most of them definitively in the realm of the First-World problem. Xanax, Adderall, heroin, energy drinks, phenethylamine, doughnuts, pizza, zinfandel, kale, cocaine, and kombucha: Enough of that, and some weirdly surreal moments are wont to happen, as when Boyle, as if discovering language, writes, “ ‘bumpy fish’ is a code name for bumpy fish. and maybe that’s all you need to know.” Maybe. Probably. It stands to reason that living in Brooklyn while entertaining such a diet, staying up all night and sleeping all day, and spending your life on the keyboard might impede one’s financial progress, and so it is: “dad agreed to give me money for groceries and things,” she writes. “seems shitty of me. i’m 27 years old. i’m sick.“ Dad is always there to help, it seems, and so is Mom, while others in the chronicler’s life are less helpful, from the landlord demanding rent to “everyone who doesn’t floss regularly.” Still, Boyle’s log/blog, billed as a novel, is full of zeitgeist-y stuff that will puzzle future historians, punctuated by moments of millennial aspiration, self-direction, and exhortation, from “Do not fuck with me” to “hang up clothes/laundry.”
A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want to give.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992186-2-4
Page Count: 712
Publisher: Tyrant Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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