A wounded and affecting memoir lurks beneath the surface here; pity if it stays buried.
Uneasy memoir/history lesson from a quirky comedian.
Fans of Poundstone’s wry, ironic observational humor were shocked by allegations made in 2001 that the standup comedian had endangered and sexually abused her three adopted children (the charges were later dropped). The specter of that scandal hangs over this collection of ostensibly whimsical essays on the accomplishments of historical figures as contrasted with the quotidian struggles of the author. Poundstone is legally enjoined from discussing the particulars of the case, but her many references to the pain and humiliation she suffered in its wake are charged with a profound anger and emotional rawness that make for an awkward mix with the determinedly breezy tone of the prose. Her descriptions of the bureaucratic nightmare of court dates and mandated therapy sessions, and of her love for her adopted children (some of whom have severe physical and emotional problems) are in fact the most compelling aspects of the book, to the point that the historical material becomes an unwelcome distraction. It’s as if she set out to write a lighthearted monologue with an amusing conceit (Beethoven composed great symphonies despite being deaf, while Poundstone can’t get her daughter to practice piano; rinse, lather, repeat), but her personal trauma keeps bubbling to the surface. This tension has turned a slight and forgettable book into an interesting, if uncomfortable and unsatisfying, one. Poundstone is never less than clever and likable, even as a decidedly odd self-portrait slowly emerges: She portrays herself, with endearingly reflexive self-deprecation, as an alcoholic, completely disengaged from sex, maniacally compulsive about housework, anxious about money and something of an alienated, morbidly private underachiever. It’s this character, rather than Sitting Bull or Joan of Arc, that here commands the reader’s sympathy and interest. A narrative dealing head-on with her legal problems and embattled family would have made for a gripping reading experience indeed.
A wounded and affecting memoir lurks beneath the surface here; pity if it stays buried.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-609-60316-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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