Poetic, vivid and stained with tears of regret.
A junkie hipster’s memoir of his vagabond life doubles as a love letter to his brilliant, troubled older sister.
Literary folk may have recognized Geng only as the drugged, thieving brother of legendary New Yorker humorist Veronica Geng, but on the sketchier side of Manhattan, he was himself a legend, albeit of a very different kind. Record Steve, or just plain “Rec,” could boost whole shelves’ worth of LPs from stores on a daily basis. As related in his sharp, picaresque memoir, he was a long time coming to this notoriety and certainly earned it. Born in 1943, an army brat who spent most of his childhood in Philadelphia, Geng developed a taste for trouble as his bitter, irascible father was reassigned to bases in Germany and France. There, easy access to jazz clubs, Beat literature and drugs helped form the author’s future; his models were “the hipster, the hophead, and the hustler.” Back in the U.S., he fit right into the ’60s Greenwich Village scene, described here with memorable vitality as a trickster world of jazz and scams through which he flitted for several decades in a fun-and-danger-seeking haze. As Geng’s underworld star rose, so did the literary reputation of “Ronnie,” the sister he loved more than anything and hated to disappoint. While Steve ran scams and fenced stolen goods to feed his habit, she wrote humor pieces for the New Yorker, edited Philip Roth and had bad affairs with a number of Manhattan luminaries. (In addition to a sharp wit, the siblings shared strong self-destructive tendencies.) Geng is an astute chronicler of his milieu, sharply evoking everything from Village taverns to the “soulful and lighthearted energy” of black juke joints in the Florida town where he lived for a while with his dying father. He’s also a writer of powerful emotion, exploring the highs and lows of his fraught relationship with the tragically mercurial Ronnie.
Poetic, vivid and stained with tears of regret.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-8056-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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