A cultural history of Key West as experienced by some of its most famous residents.
McKeen (Journalism/Boston Univ.; Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, 2008, etc.) transports readers to Key West, a wonderland of cigar rollers and beautiful women that for generations has maintained a reputation for lawlessness as well. It is also described as "the end of the road, the last outpost for an American original.” Among these Americans originals are a wide array of writers: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Hunter S. Thompson, as well as musician Jimmy Buffett, whose music set the tone for the town. What begins as a biography of a place soon branches off into mini-biographies of its residents. McKeen holds his gaze longest on McGuane, described as "the most revered writer of his generation.” Yet soon after his arrival, even McGuane became afflicted with the vices of the island, engaging in the excesses of boozing and womanizing that became a trademark for many of the island's better-known inhabitants. "Lust was a legacy of island life,” writes McKeen, a statement McGuane seemed to set out to prove. Equally engaging is the story of Buffett's miraculous rise from "scruffy street singer" to beloved entertainer. Much of his stardom was attributed to his hit single, "Margaritaville," which “bottled up the essence of Key West in an effervescent, maddeningly memorable pop song.” By the end of the book, McKeen also offers his own take on capturing the essence of the place: “Key West is still Key West"—a statement that, while cryptic, seems to somehow say it all. An engrossing tell-all in which Key West's most notable residents struggle to find sanity, sobriety and a place to call home.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59200-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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