Sincere but slight, best taken with a joint.
Confessions of a pot smoker from comic Chong, who depicts his nine months in the federal pen for selling high-quality glass bongs on the Internet.
Expanding his act without partner Cheech Marin, the aging hipster recalls his impoverished Calgary childhood and salutes his family and friends as he describes the 2003 raid and subsequent trial in which the authorities argued that drug paraphernalia supported terrorism. The book’s second half begins as, sporting extra underwear, Chong heads for the minimum-security hoosegow. There he finds that his popularity outside continues inside. As a friendly con, he joins a sweat lodge, tries gardening, builds a kiln, reads the I Ching. (His memoir takes its format from that ancient program.) He meditates. “Some religions base their entire philosophy around the practice,” he notes, “and some religions use meditation as a religion.” Chong waxes righteous in a heartfelt ’60s flower-child manner. He offers a mélange of decent social consciousness and blameless self-regard. He believes his sojourn in jail is the establishment’s punishment for his free stoner lifestyle. The Great Bong Raid and his arrest were, he believes, at the behest of the Republican Christian Right. The controllers of the Oval Office have it in for him personally. Despite his loyal fan base, Chong’s manifesto is not likely to prompt regime change in America. On he sermonizes, though, with sweet assurance. For as long as he can remember, he has “always had a special relationship with God.” He knows the key to Heaven and humanity’s real mission in Life. He expounds on the major problems facing the world today and the only way to be truly happy. When you have dignity, he says, you have respect. Life, he offers, is like golf. (Or like a box of chocolates. Whatever.) Preaching love and cannabis, this tract by a good ol’ hippie contains less than meets the I Ching. It’s also just a bit addled.
Sincere but slight, best taken with a joint.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-1554-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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