Both sincere and subversive, Pollack will likely inspire more than one reader to commit to yoga.
Freelance journalist Pollack (Alternadad, 2007, etc.) seeks to reclaim his better self within the ridicule-friendly world of yoga.
Once upon a time, the author was a hot writer, a charmingly comedic iconoclast ever ready to poke a sharp stick in the eye of convention. The world at his doorstep, he did the “full retard,” making a narcissistic ass of himself, fueled by a steady intake of recreational intoxicants. His descent was meteoric. In a review of his novel Never Mind the Pollacks (2003), the New York Times Book Review wrote that Pollack had gone from incandescent satirist to an “ordinary humor dork, yet another doughy, 35-ish white man with a goatee and thinning hair.” When his agent stopped calling, the author decided to regroup and, at the suggestion of his wife, try yoga. However, yoga—or at least its wayward applications: “high-priced self-empowerment for the over-privileged creative class”—is just the kind of activity that Pollack used to demolish with satire. But something clicked. He hasn’t abandoned snark and cynicism—they are the lifeblood of this quest, along with a healthy dose of self-abasement—but at his unassuming local yoga place, he found that the practice “calmed his inner pervert.” His circumstantial rage was chilled as he sweat through the routines, but he’s still a yoga bad boy, a bong-hitting carnivore with a taste for laughter, which makes him a highly entertaining guide as he investigates the good, bad and ugly of the yoga spectrum, from yogathons to yoga competitions to freestyle yoga rap. There is also a lovely authenticity to his discovery of his yoga fundamentalism—“the words of ancients and a few sacred physical principles that humans have been practicing since the dawn of time.”
Both sincere and subversive, Pollack will likely inspire more than one reader to commit to yoga.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-172769-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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