A brisk but slapdash, unrewarding journey.
Graphic designer and illustrator Shopsin (C’est le Pied II, 2009, etc.) delivers a terse account of a visit to India and her work as a freelance artist, with asides on her marriage, novelties business and family’s restaurant.
As a traveler abroad, the author is a bit frail—always tired, always sick, often scared. Many readers may find her incessant whining and timidity irritating, until the discovery of what might have induced her frequent bouts of nausea and unsteadiness of foot: a brain tumor. But apart from the impulse to wish her a full recovery and admiration for her genuine courage during the ordeal, this has no bearing, after the fact, on the writing. Even if the disjointed narrative is meant to reflect the effects of the tumor on her state of mind, readers will still note the book’s many shortcomings. The memoir is rambling and unfocused, offering 132 pages on her experiences in India yet no concrete take on the country or culture save for impressions of chaos. Readers may enjoy the story to the extent that they favor the author’s odd marriage of clipped sentences and stream-of-consciousness style (with too many meandering eddies), yet it suggests that Shopsin simply wrote down whatever popped into her head. The book is freighted with trivialities and pointless digressions, and if there is the occasional arresting observation or fleck of wit, it’s buried beneath an avalanche of irrelevancies. Punctuated with photographs that barely qualify as snapshots, it’s a 288-page book with half as much content, given the curious “open” typography and page breaks. Some will find the approach whimsical, others superficial and undisciplined.
A brisk but slapdash, unrewarding journey.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8741-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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