Next book

THE INNER ELVIS

A PSYCHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY OF ELVIS AARON PRESLEY

A depressing pathography positing that every instant of Elvis's life was warped by the stillbirth of his twin brother, Jesse, and the consequent morbidly close relationship between Elvis and his mother, Gladys. Psychologist Whitmer (When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, 1993, etc.) says that ``twinless twins'' feel driven to prove their uniqueness, but after attaining recognition they feel survivor guilt. They also have a pathologically strong maternal bond; Whitmer asserts that Elvis was ``clearly'' a victim of ``lethal enmeshment,'' or ``nonsexual incest.'' Source notes, which might provide clinical authority for all of this, were not available for review; but Phyllis Diller offers her expert theory that ``if his twin had lived, I am sure that Elvis's twin would have been gay.'' Up to a point, Whitmer's theories have some merit, but the book goes overboard in reducing Elvis's musical accomplishments to the side effect of a near-crippling neurosis. The sinister tone of unrelenting torment—even Elvis's devious manager, Col. Tom Parker, is said to operate out of a ``pit of fear''—owes much to John Bradshaw's brand of character analysis, in which no tic is too minor to be a symptom of incest. Considering that he was insulated from the world and insistently hungry for food, drugs, sex, and the company of his Memphis Mafia during the 1960s and '70s, Elvis's psychopathology is a significant issue, but the reduction of all these needs to the Jesse/Gladys/Elvis nexus seems facile. And while Whitmer attempts to portray the social, familial, musical, and cultural context from which Elvis emerged, this material was handled much more sensitively and informatively in Peter Guralnick's thrilling study, Last Train to Memphis (1994). Marred by many errors and doggedly intent on turning Elvis into a traumatized pop-psych poster boy, Whitmer's version of the life makes for unpleasant reading. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1996

ISBN: 0-7868-6102-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Hyperion

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 16


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 16


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview