A dull memoir of college life in the ’80s.
Vanity Fair contributing editor Rushfield (On Spec: A Novel of Young Hollywood, 2000) recounts his years at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., in the late 1980s.
The author, a Los Angeles native, attended the liberal-arts college from 1986 to 1991, and discovered early on that he only rarely had to attend classes or complete assignments. The college’s alternative-education program—loosely based around evaluations rather than distribution requirements or GPAs—attracted a variety of students from a wide range of counterculture groups, from hacky-sacking hippies to punks to postmodernists to political activists. Rushfield became a part of a much-reviled clique, the Supreme Dicks, who were almost cultish in their dogma of vegetarianism, celibacy, atonal music-making and a studied lack of interest in most other activities. The author’s college life consisted mainly of hanging out with his friends, listening to hip music, pursuing relationships with noncommittal college girls and faking his way through classes on Miami Vice and Michel Foucault. Rushfield’s circle of friends, and the politically correct, alternate-reality atmosphere of Hampshire, is great fodder for a hilarious memoir. But while Rushfield the novelist has shown a keen talent for satire, Rushfield the memoirist is much more cautious with his barbs. He gets all the band names and pop-culture references right, but offers little perspective on the shallowness of his younger self and his acquaintances. The book’s biggest problem, however, is simply a lack of interesting material. Rushfield references Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel Less Than Zero early on, and this memoir shares that novel’s tendency toward static scenes and vapid, aimless dialogue. In one overlong section, several pages detail a relatively uneventful trip to a Denny’s restaurant. Rushfield’s nostalgia for his school days often overwhelms his ability to tell a compelling story.
A dull memoir of college life in the ’80s.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40453-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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