Next book

FEAR AND LOATHING

THE STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON

This breezy, superficial book is a ``violently unauthorized biography'' of America's notorious ``outlaw'' journalist. Part groupie, part hagiographer, Perry (coauthor, On the Bus, 1990—not reviewed) seems determined to prove that Thompson's life is interchangeable with his literary persona: a wild man whose capacity for drugs is Olympian, and who needs this excess to produce his eccentric art. Straightforward, conventional, and anecdotal, Perry's narrative avoids imitating Thompson's manic prose style. But there's something too sober and bland about this uncritical portrait based largely on interviews with Thompson's friends. As a 50's adolescent, Thompson raised hell in Louisville, Kentucky, where he failed to distinguish himself at school or sports. His obsession with ``the failure of the American Dream'' seems to be rooted in profound social resentment. A poor kid whose best friends were rich and Ivy-bound, Thompson landed in the Air Force, where he discovered that journalism could be both fictive and a free ride. As an angry young man, he wrote unpublished novels and committed unsavory deeds (woman-beating, gay-bashing, etc.). But his interest in literature and journalism, in Perry's view, redeems his boorish behavior. A stint with The National Observer allowed Thompson to develop his singular style of participatory reporting, but it wasn't until he covered the Kentucky Derby that his ``gonzo'' technique began. From then on, Thompson and his cohorts made themselves the story. ``Hooked on radical politics,'' Thompson found indulgence at Rolling Stone, where his work was coaxed out from him. Thompson's cocaine paranoia of the 80's accounts for his decline as a writer, says Perry, who nevertheless managed to midwife a piece from him as editor of Running magazine. A memoir of this experience adds a vivid, if self-serving, bit of detail to a legendary career. Despite much testimony to Thompson's debauchery, Perry skirts the important facts of his life (e.g., his family), and fails to see how sad a saga this is. (First printing of 50,000)

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993

ISBN: 1-56025-012-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Close Quickview