A candid, eye-opening memoir of illicit drugs and sex—though, for some readers, it may prove too intimate and too full of...
Time editor Lansky delivers a gut-wrenching exposé of his adolescence, a period filled with a steady diet of drugs, prescription and street, and one-night stands with older men.
During the day, Lansky attended an elite New York City prep school and aspired to enroll at Princeton, but at night, he slipped out of his father's apartment to snort cocaine, take large doses of Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin, Ambien, and other drugs, drink too much alcohol, and have sex with strangers he'd met online or in bars and clubs. The writing is raw and haunting, encouraging readers to keep turning the pages as the author describes countless situations where he shouldn't have made it through the night but did. He delves into the distress he felt over his parents' divorce and the semi-lack of compassion he felt his father showed him at the time. "My father expressed some low-level concern over how many pills I had been prescribed,” he writes, “but my grades were up, which suggested that [the doctor’s] cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs was working. Yet I was sickly, pallid, temperamental, and always covered in a thin film of sweat, even in the dead of winter. I never ate, except for occasional, extraordinary binges that left me ill for days; I slept perhaps once a week, for twenty-four hours straight.” Lansky also explores his relationships during that time, mostly older men who had no real intentions of staying with him. The narrative’s best moments are the author’s thoughts on the wonder and wholeness he felt when attending a boot camp rehab center in Utah. Otherwise, the book reads mostly like a confessional written to atone for his sins.
A candid, eye-opening memoir of illicit drugs and sex—though, for some readers, it may prove too intimate and too full of semigraphic descriptions of the sex, drugs, and misery he suffered through before finally quitting before he was 20.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7614-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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