An unremarkable memoir, but Disney fans will probably appreciate the insider view.
A close-up of life at Disney World.
Mitchell’s memoir speaks to a popular fantasy of running away to join the workforce at the iconic vacation destination: “All my life, Disney has been a kind of sanctuary for me, a place that felt safe when everything else was going fuzzy.” The California-bred author had worked as a semi-professional skateboarder and freelance photographer when cascading personal crises propelled him toward an impulsive move to the Magic Kingdom, where he quickly found work in photo processing. He was instantly fascinated by the intricacies of Disney culture: hidden messages in park architecture, endless regulations enforced by prissy managers and a high-school–like system of cliques with the employees who play “characters” at the top. “Anyone who believed in fairies could work, live, eat, drink, and date entirely within the Disney matrix without ever leaving Disney property,” he writes. “And from what I could tell, it wasn’t uncommon.” Initially disdained, Mitchell figured out a way to break the rules, becoming known as the “out of character” photographer—Goofy smoking, for instance—which ingratiated him with the snooty inner circle of Cast Members. Soon he committed the ultimate sin, when an attractive co-worker (“Dale”, as in Chip ’n Dale) initiated him into the SOP (Sex on Property) Club: “I was if I could almost see the spirit of Walt shaking his head, sorely disappointed.” Eventually, Mitchell became disillusioned in Orlando, especially after he was turned down for a coveted “face character” role of Aladdin, and learned that his friends and girlfriend at Disney were not the carefree perpetual adolescents they pretended to be. Mitchell effectively captures the inside minutiae of working at Disney, which will surely interest fans, and its surreal effect on the Central Florida landscape. However, the prose is often rambling and heavy on adjectives and clumsy similes.
An unremarkable memoir, but Disney fans will probably appreciate the insider view.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3128-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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