Enjoyably bitchy specifics of Condé Nast culture, buried beneath tedious social analysis and self-deprecation.
Kiss-and-tell memoir of Young's ill-fated stint as contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.
When we first meet our hero, he is desperately attempting to gain admittance to the 1994 Vanity Fair Oscar party, the most exclusive ticket in Hollywood on the night of the Academy Awards. Not that he is truly starstruck, Young says. No, he has adopted this attitude in response to his British circle's sham indifference to celebrities: “I hammed up my obsession with A-list stars as a way of letting my friends know I found their pretence at insouciance totally unconvincing.” This contrary attitude coupled with romantic notions about Algonquin Round Table journalism eventually delivers Young, the son of towering English intellectuals, to the New York offices of Vanity Fair, where he attempts, mostly unsuccessfully, to make a splash. Editor Graydon Carter is unimpressed with his story pitches; a barroom brawl results in Young's name being removed from the masthead; and an uninformed Young hires a stripper to come to the office on “Bring our daughters to work day.” In between detailing his own failures, Young dishes his friends and colleagues (for some reason, Anthony Haden-Guest is given a particularly rough time of it), moans about what serious wankers his workmates are (the Vanity Fair offices are compared to an accounting firm), and brings Tocqueville's observations about Americans to bear on contemporary culture. This skewering of celebrity worship at the nation's leading “upscale supermarket tabloid” bears a distinct resemblance to shooting fish in a barrel; nonetheless, Young's language is energetic and engaging, making one wish (along with his father, apparently) that he'd find a worthier subject.
Enjoyably bitchy specifics of Condé Nast culture, buried beneath tedious social analysis and self-deprecation.Pub Date: July 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-306-81188-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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