High and low, crushing and comic, indelible as India ink.
Poet Kleinzahler (Green Sees Things in Waves, 1998, etc.) adeptly and frankly chronicles episodes from a strange, unenviable life.
When the author was seven and his brother called him obnoxious, he writes, “I resolved to become a man of letters. If there were words as punishing as this, I wanted my quiver to be full of them.” It is. Kleinzahler comes out of his corner at the reader like a veteran boxer: First there will be some jazzy entertainment and fancy stepping, then he’ll send you a line that stings with nose-bleeding accuracy. We start with his childhood in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He was an unexpected baby—a little too much to drink and “mother became pregnant with me, years after she’d convinced herself she’d beaten that particular rap”—with a sister who lived in the attic, a brother given to mayhem, and parents who would rather be in another room. His neighbors were Murder Inc.’s CEO Albert Anastasia and the Palisades Amusement Park. His saviors were his dog and his brother, who figures in a final chapter that hits like a broadside. “He was born wild, born troubled,” concludes the poet. “He wasn’t designed for the long haul; not everyone is.” Kleinzahler is good with unsettling, epigrammatic flashes, but he can also be mellow, pursuing the syntax of place on a bus ride from San Diego to El Cajon in a piece that proclaims “flânerie, that's my thing,” or capturing his favorite bar, a depressing, cavelike, unfriendly joint called Persian Aub Zam Zam, in a profile that bears comparison with the best of Joseph Mitchell. Drinking provides the autobiographical segue to a thorough mugging of the movie Leaving Las Vegas, and it might also explain his penchant for fistfights and comments like “what really drew me to Melodia . . . was her taste for being tied up and sodomized, all the while muttering prayers in Latin.”
High and low, crushing and comic, indelible as India ink.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-13377-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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