Enjoyable manifesto celebrating rootless irresponsibility, with rueful acknowledgement of the pitfalls therein.
From the creator of one of the 1990s’ best ’zines, a debut memoir chronicling his mission to wash dishes in each of the 50 states.
A San Francisco kid who spent his youth getting in trouble with cops, the author found that he liked wandering around the country much better than attending college or maintaining any sort of steady work. Dishwashing, he discovered, was the holy grail of itinerant employment. Being a “suds buster,” as Jordan memorably dubs it, isn’t exactly high in prestige—he quotes an opinion survey that ranked dishwashing #735 in status out of 740 jobs—but there are always openings and few expectations, since most dishwashers last no more than a few weeks at a time. The profession’s traditions include “laziness, drunkenness and ditching jobs without even a minute’s notice”—and you have to quit, since it’s basically impossible to get fired. Jordan was in Alaska when he got the notion to wash dishes nationwide and create “a little dishwashing publication” as well; a knowledgeable subs-busting buddy explained what a ’zine was and handed him a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London. Inspired by Orwell’s memorable delineation of the plongeur ethos, Jordan photocopied Dishwasher #1 in Arizona, put out a second issue in Texas and managed to squeeze out 13 more over a dozen years of hitchhiking, bumming rides from friends, crashing on people’s couches and getting dumped by girlfriends. (A postscript tells those who ordered #16 to get in touch, and he’ll make good.) Among his most challenging gigs: an isolated post on an oil rig and an attempt to disprove the received wisdom that a white guy couldn’t get hired in New Orleans, where all the suds busters were black or Mexican.
Enjoyable manifesto celebrating rootless irresponsibility, with rueful acknowledgement of the pitfalls therein.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-089642-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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