Bland prose and few original insights.
A mildly engaging but flawed memoir of addiction and recovery from freelance journalist Moore.
Growing up in Iowa, the author knew he was gay—and that Iowa was boring. There wasn’t much to do but get smashed or high. After graduating from high school, he escaped to college in Pittsburgh, where he met Dino and began an intense love affair. Though they were passionate about one another, both periodically slept with other men; Dino eventually was diagnosed with AIDS. As he cared for his dying lover, Moore, who hadn’t been infected, found relief in activism, getting arrested during early ACT UP protests. He also found more sinister distraction in drugs, especially crystal meth and coke. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles and got sober. He was helped by AA’s storied “higher power,” praying sometimes to Dino, sometimes to the ocean. He took up yoga and spent time in sweat lodges. In the book’s better moments, Moore interjects social critique with a light touch—wondering, for example, why the mainstream media began worrying about meth only once straight teens were hooked. The most gripping scenes find him sober, working at a recovery house and helping other addicts. He compellingly describes the “assortment of castoffs” who came together to beat their addictions; Judy, the tough-skinned lesbian counselor who led the recovery group, steals the show. Other characters, unfortunately, are not as vividly rendered. Moore’s long reminiscences about Dino, for example, would have been enlivened by more dialogue. The author’s non-chronological technique, flashing backward and forward among various memories, proves confusing and irksome. In addition, it feels forced to begin and end the memoir with reflections on the author’s quirky grandmother, who struggled with her own addictions.
Bland prose and few original insights.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-7582-1265-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
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