Too bad, because the fun stuff is in his life: some astute editor should offer Nisker a contract to write a full-scale...
Bay Area radio personality Nisker (If You Don’t Like the News, 1994, etc.) mixes engaging autobiography with philosophical musings.
His journey toward radical journalism and practicing Buddhism began, this amiable outsider declares, when he was a child in a modest Nebraska town with not a single other Jewish family. “My bar mitzvah lessons exemplified my early spiritual confusion,” he writes. “I was memorizing long passages of transliterated Hebrew script that made no sense to me in preparation for joining a Jewish community that in my hometown did not even exist.” To further his confusion, the author spent vacations at a Zionist summer camp in Wisconsin, where the Israeli flag was raised each day and the children sang the Israeli national anthem. At college Nisker discovered existentialist philosophy, Jack Kerouac, and mind-altering drugs. After convincing his local draft board to give him a 4F classification, he headed to California to attend the Monterey Pop Festival and was swept up in the counterculture, landing a job as a newscaster on San Francisco alternative radio station KSAN-FM. Here Nisker really shines, as he provides wonderful details about the station itself (each day the morning disc jockey would give a full astrology report), his own unique newscasts, and even the era’s characteristic commercials. (At one point, the station ran ads from 11 different waterbed companies.) In 1979, the station changed its format to “urban country,” and Nisker was out of a job. By 1983, as news director at KFOG-FM, he was receiving memos from his boss that read, “I think we should watch the tendency to sound too much like we’re doing news in 1969.” At this point Nisker turns away from autobiography to muse about seemingly every New Age practice of the 1960s and ’70s, contemplating the counterculture’s spiritual legacy.
Too bad, because the fun stuff is in his life: some astute editor should offer Nisker a contract to write a full-scale memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-251766-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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