Serious subject; vain, vacuous treatment. (16 pp. b&w photos, mercifully not seen)
Young man survives violent childhood to play big-time college football, perform in some forgettable films, party with Melanie Griffith, and travel the country speaking on behalf of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
In a random, roving, forgettable, and largely regrettable text, Rivers seems unsure about what sort of book he’s writing. Is it a memoir of child abuse? A play-by-play account of his high-school and college football games? A wistful story about how he almost made it in pro football and Hollywood? A handbook of ways to describe attractive women (the only type he ever seems to notice)? A catalogue of clichés? His memoir is all of these and more. The author’s brutal father appears to have been an artist of abuse, punching his children regularly for minor infractions of his draconian household code and kicking his pregnant wife in the stomach. Dad tied young Victor to a kitchen chair and hit his hands with a meat tenderizer, burned his stomach with a red-hot knife blade (this after two days of beatings), tied him up again and whipped him with a dog chain. Baseball, football, and hot women eventually saved Rivers from a life of depravity and despair. One charming two-page anecdote reveals how he once emptied a room of film-watching Miami Dolphins with a really raunchy fart; he claims his fellow linemen were proud of his accomplishment. (These were, of course, the offensive linemen.) Naturally, he learns other important Life Lessons from football, a game whose drama Rivers compares to that of Shakespeare’s. The author repeatedly praises his own looks, sense of humor, and terpsichorean grace. He marvels at his luck when he finds himself at a Hollywood soiree standing in the kitchen with Melanie Griffith, Madonna, Cher, and Demi Moore—it’s a wonderful life! Eventually, he finds True Love, has a son, and gets a significant gig going around telling his sensational stories.
Serious subject; vain, vacuous treatment. (16 pp. b&w photos, mercifully not seen)Pub Date: April 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8788-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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