A distanced portrait of an eccentric family that fails to engage.
In his debut memoir, former GQ managing editor Smith pays underwhelming homage to his father.
As interior decorator to Miami’s rich and famous, Lew Smith was celebrated for fashion-forward designs that ranged from “tropical-fantasy” to “Zen-inspired.” Wife Esther threw lavish dinner parties with swinging gay men, and the couple frequently graced the local newspapers’ society pages. The author’s early childhood in the 1950s included getaways to Havana, where his parents danced the night away while six-year-old Philip nursed rum cocktails at the bar. Gradually, Lew eschewed the ritzy nightlife in favor of a macrobiotic diet, esoteric forms of yoga and a relentless commitment to the study and practice of spirituality. To his family’s disbelief, he became a local psychic, using his “gift from God” and a trusty pendulum to heal Miami’s deaf, blind, crippled and cancer-ridden, never charging them a dime. The repetitious healing scenes fall a little too neatly into place and don’t explain much about Lew. Meanwhile, teenaged Philip began dabbling with girls, boys, electroshock therapy (to cure him of his attraction to the boys) and even Scientology, but his stabs at adolescent rebellion were continually thwarted by his father’s psychic abilities. Indeed, Smith seems more interested in Lew’s development than his own, giving only passing mention to such potentially rich subjects as his confusion about his sexual identity and his struggle to cope with his parents’ divorce. The author provides colorful descriptions of Miami, beginning in the ’50s, when it was “a big ol’ cracker swamp due east of the Everglades [where] Dixiecrats, blacks, and coral snakes summed up the population, in that order.” Regrettably, the city is a more fully realized character than any of the Smiths. By the time the author injects more of himself into the text, as he unravels the mystery of his father’s untimely death, it’s too little, too late.
A distanced portrait of an eccentric family that fails to engage.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4294-0
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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