Slapdash and inessential.
The actor best known for his portrayal of B.J. Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H demonstrates that book tours are every bit as tedious as imagined.
In May 2008, Farrell (Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist, 2007) rented a Prius (nicknamed “Mule”) and looped across the United States on a 25-city book tour. Reading about his cross-country trip is like thumbing through a stranger’s travel diary—it’s chock full of meandering, superficial observations that ultimately don’t add up to much. Even though each event was co-sponsored by individuals or groups dedicated to social justice, Farrell rarely reflects on the progressive nature of his tour—how it was conceived, what he hoped to accomplish, how it could serve as a model for other authors. Rather than weaving his involvement with these organizations into the narrative, the author includes dry summaries of their missions in boxed-off spaces. Moreover, he often undercuts his stance as an activist with his condescending tone. He sneers at right-wing radio hosts and their audiences (“I truly worry about the people who listen to this crap all the time”) and resorts to ad hominem attacks against former President Bush, referring to him as “President Stupid” and a “the pathetic, smirking narcissist who occupies our White House.” The larger problem, however, is that Farrell too often glosses over the unique aspects of his tour. In New Orleans, he met with Sister Helen Prejean, a renowned opponent of the death penalty, and instead of offering vivid scenes or telling anecdotes, he simply notes that they had a “great dinner and wonderful conversation.” In contrast, Farrell dedicates nearly an entire chapter to getting an oil change at a Firestone dealer in New York City. Despite his forced attempts at whimsy—largely through unconvincing conversations with Mule—what his chronicles inadvertently portray is the mundane, repetitive nature of the modern book tour, where authors skip from city to city with little time to explore individual communities or interact with readers.
Slapdash and inessential.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933354-75-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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