A wide-ranging, smart, and witty collection testifying to an impressive career.
The former editor of Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated looks back.
After 40 years as journalist, editor, and magazine founder, McDonell celebrates his career with a collection of short pieces that include acerbic commentaries on the media, tender remembrances of friends and colleagues, and cogent advice to editors and writers. Sharp profiles feature “vaguely menacing” Hunter S. Thompson, moody Kurt Vonnegut, elegant Paris Review editor George Plimpton, and “princely and brooding” Steve Jobs, among many others. McDonell defines his life as “accidental”: “Ideas got broken and jobs didn’t work out. Friends faded. Love failed. But the thing was, no matter how strange or rocky it got, there was redemption in the work. That was not accidental.” He loved editing, which, he says, is “never only about the words” but also images, typography, display copy, and “polish and nuance.” He admires precision (Gay Talese’s sentences, he remarks, were unfailingly “immaculate”), advises writers to “cut anything precious, overly clever or self-indulgent,” and admonishes reporters: “Check your sources.” Among the most moving pieces are homages to friends, including irreverent Harper’s Bazaar editor Elizabeth Tilberis; novelist James Salter; and Peter Matthiessen, a writer whose work McDonell finds “astonishing in its range.” The author portrays the unlikely friendship between George Plimpton and Hunter Thompson, fueled by their love of cocaine. He also offers withering anecdotes about Jobs, who came to Newsweek in 1984, “wearing a sharp suit and tiny bow tie,” to sell staff on “the greatest tool ever”: the Apple computer. In 2010, an imperious Jobs arrived at Time, Inc., seated at the head of a table of top editors who fiddled with soon-to-be released iPads. McDonell, who founded LitHub, does not bemoan digital media, but he regrets that “digital content” meetings rarely focus on the quality of journalism.
A wide-ranging, smart, and witty collection testifying to an impressive career.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94671-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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