Ultimately, Clune remains unconvinced and unrepentant, offering his rebuttal in this provocative book.
A memoir about coming of age with video games, in which the author finds a reality more real than the outside world.
Having written a well-received memoir of heroin and recovery (White Out, 2013), Clune (English/Case Western Reserve Univ.) illuminates a different and perhaps more powerful addiction. The author makes no pretense of academic objectivity toward his gaming experience or even older-and-wiser distance from it. “You think I wrote a book about computer games for fun? If I want fun, I’ll play a computer game,” he writes, after postulating a theory about how “the history of computer games is also a philosophical encyclopedia containing every important truth available to our species.” The ideal readers for this book are those who are as immersed and invested in gaming as the author is (or has been; the narrative only offers a few fleeting glimpses into his post-adolescence). But many of the issues that it raises—the plight of the boy at the dawn of the Internet, trying to process suburbia, divorce, and alienation from would-be friends—have wider resonance. Clune never treats games as an escape but rather an entry into a heightened reality, an education, a creative stimulus, and a portal for self-discovery. “It isn’t easy to grow away from the people,” he writes. “You need imagination. My imagination was as weak as a baby’s arm until computer games trained it.” He writes of games as a means of bonding with kindred spirits, though the memoir ends with him on the outside looking in, very much alone. The author also flashes forward to the years when he was pursuing his doctorate and had apparently kicked the habit: “My professors and so-called friends had broken me. They’d convinced me that…computer games were sucking my life dry instead of nourishing it. Deadening my brain instead of illuminating it.”
Ultimately, Clune remains unconvinced and unrepentant, offering his rebuttal in this provocative book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86547-828-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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