Affecting, heavy and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny account of growing up with a crazy father.
Stage and TV actor Birkenhead, a Salon.com and Marie Claire contributor, revisits his highly unusual childhood.
The eldest of four, the author grew up in suburban Long Island, where the center of his universe was his capricious, vitriolic father. The book’s title is a nod to Gonville Bromhead, a real-life mid-19th-century British lieutenant portrayed by Michael Caine in Zulu (1964). Gonville was a favorite of Dad, who was known to dress up—in a helmet and red underwear—and impersonate Gonville. An anglophile, nudist and avid gun collector, Birkenhead’s father married his mother when she was 19 and he was 24. From the outside he maintained the appearance of normalcy, working as an economics professor at Brooklyn College. The private dynamics, however, dictated by his erratic mood swings, led to his tormenting of the family, with violence and threats, and nine miserable months living in Sussex, England. Birkenhead’s mother bore the worst of his abuse, including a broken nose and a brush with marital rape after their separation, but she pioneered a successful career writing musicals. The author chronicles his swirling confusion through adolescence as he came to grips with his father’s madness, and darkest, most intriguing part of his memoir centers on his own inner demons. After punching a high-school girlfriend in the face and, years later, kicking in the door of another lover, he was forced to confront the behaviors and instincts inherited from his father. The book originated as a one-man show, and it still possesses a conversational quality, reading like a tempered monologue peppered with explosive crescendos. Birkenhead is less interested in language than pure storytelling, and he pulls no punches in depicting his once-idolized father as a deeply flawed wreck of a man.
Affecting, heavy and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny account of growing up with a crazy father.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9883-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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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