Honest to a fault, richly veined with indelible images: a monumental piece of work.
A founding McSweeney’s editor tells about his privileged and impressively troubled young years, with surprisingly few missteps on a well-worn path.
Wilsey was blessed and cursed with an extraordinarily messy, dramatic, wealthy family that tore him to shreds when they weren’t casting him aside. The story begins in a frantic flurry that the rest of the book—wonderfully lengthy by the standards of this generation, who normally sum things up in 180 or so loosely spaced pages—will wind itself trying to keep up with: “In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.” Wilsey’s father was a millionaire many times over, while his mother was a legendary beauty raised by itinerant heartland preachers—the pair of them whirling dervishes of Bay Area society, she hosting salons and he buzzing over Napa Valley in his helicopter. Wilsey was alternately obsessed over and ignored. Already withdrawn by the time his father (after having an affair with Danielle Steele) left his mother for her best friend, a rapacious social X-ray, he, not much later, became a full-blown delinquent. A rich kid cliché, he shuttled between his sniping parents and rambled through an ’80s adolescence stoned and clueless, slumping further into a self-destructive despondency. Meanwhile, his mother dragged him and a retinue of children around the world in a surreal campaign for peace that was more exasperatingly arrogant one-woman theater (camera crews! meeting Gorbachev!) than humanitarian endeavor. Wilsey’s prose can’t hope to maintain its rather astonishing momentum through almost 500 pages, and so some stretches drag, especially those about the creepy program that seems more cult than school but that does manage to straighten the boy out. Only in his later years does the focus of Wilsey’s self-lacerating style soften somewhat—he’s not a writer you want to see mellow—but it’s a small complaint.
Honest to a fault, richly veined with indelible images: a monumental piece of work.Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-051-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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