A brilliantly written nonfiction account of a man’s search for meaning in the odd picaresque of his life.
Yerucham’s memoir chronicles sex, drugs, madness, and spiritual questing.
The author revisits his life from 1981 to 2022, starting with his move from Wyoming to New York City at the age of 18 to be a writer. Yerucham had to make a living, and the book opens with his stint working at the City Lights Bar in the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center, characterized by the author as a hothouse of grizzled immigrant bartenders, gay waiters, and atmospheric jazz. Dead-end security jobs followed, along with a marriage (at the age of 21) to Gabriella, which slowly unraveled due to incompatibility, ill-advised polyamorous adventures, enervating pot-smoking, and mental illnesses (suffered by both Yerucham and Gabriella) that culminated in the author’s hospitalization in Bellevue’s psych ward for near-catatonic depression. Fleeing New York, Yerucham regrouped while working on a Wyoming ranch, then embarked on meth-fueled wanderings through the West that featured flophouses, homelessness, and a death march in the Mexican desert. After another unsuccessful attempt to establish himself in New York, the author lit out for India, where he studied at ashrams, steeped himself in meditative yoga and Jain philosophy, and met the Dalai Lama, who “received [him]…with a handshake and a painful fixed promotional grin, and displayed a hollowed deep sadness in his eyes.” A six-month detour to Israel reconnected him with his Orthodox Jewish roots; he then returned to India before moving on to Malaysia and finally to Thailand. While nourishing his soul he was also looking for a wife, which resulted in quixotic relationships with a German ashram tourist (who turned out to be gay) and a Chinese woman in Malaysia. He finally married a Siamese woman and tussled with the United States immigration bureaucracy to get her and their daughter to California.
Yerucham’s narrative rambles through many labyrinthine twists and digressions, often with no clear destination in sight; along the way, he invokes philosophers from Socrates to Sartre to glean nuggets of wisdom from his misadventures (“Suffering is the fire that burns the debris of past foolishness from the mind….From the furnace of suffering, I gathered charred relics of goodness from the remains of the mess of my twenties, and began piecing them together”). It’s a baggy, sprawling saga, but even at nearly 800 pages, it never grows tiresome thanks to the extraordinary quality of the writing. Endlessly curious and sympathetic, the author renders the parade of people he meets in subtle, evocative colors (“Dew entered wearing a simple and clean homemade dress, and exhibited a face which, in contrast to her previous innocent chipmunk face, was that of a lovelier suave mature woman, but cool and cunning and stately”)—and sometimes takes on a gonzo, hallucinatory quality worthy of Hunter S. Thompson (“He gave his best performance as devil’s right-hand man with his odd attractive laugh, mad grin, and head with high bony cheeks mounted like an idol atop his skeletal body. Roasting in the heat, he looked as if he’d been hammered and bronzed in hell furnaces for centuries”). Going everywhere yet getting nowhere, Yerucham’s journey makes for a fascinating read.
A brilliantly written nonfiction account of a man’s search for meaning in the odd picaresque of his life.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781669857310
Page Count: 792
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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