In this articulate but angst-laden memoir, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse charts the evolution of his personality flaws and sexual compulsions. Ryan, the award-winning author of three books of poetry, was molested repeatedly by a male neighbor when he was five, in the early 1950s. This, in conjunction with his father's vicious alcoholism, severely compromised Ryan's emotional development, and he presents his childhood and adolescence as an endless string of embarrassments and evasions. At age nine, just arrived in Allentown, Penn., Ryan bragged that he was a great baseball pitcher; of course, when challenged, he turned out not to be. The lies and groundless bragging continued, as did his failures. He was dumped by his first girlfriend because of his relentless idealization of her. He mocked and insulted his classmates, which cost him all his remaining friends. He got fat. His grades plummeted. He masturbated a lot. He took up bowling. But by his senior year of high school, he had (for reasons unexplained) slimmed down, concentrated on his schoolwork, and began to get dates—but what he wanted from girls was impersonal sex or heavy petting, and he would invariably drop them after a few sessions. In 1964 he entered Notre Dame, where he eventually became an outstanding scholar but continued to have unsatisfactory relations with women. Ryan jumps from his student days to 1981, when he lost a job at Princeton for sleeping with students, and then another decade, when he finally comes to terms with being a ``sex addict'' who has completely depersonalized the sexual act. Unwisely, Ryan opens with 50 pages summarizing his sex addiction, his molestation, and his father's alcoholism; the narrative punch of the remaining 300 pages is hugely diminished, and many details are pointlessly repeated. Ryan barely mentions his poetry—he's edited out everything but humiliation and depravity. A downbeat account of a confused, unhappy life. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40775-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
