Intriguing midpoint autobiography sure to rouse curiosity about what the next half has in store.
Chester's go-ahead-and-laugh debut memoir shows a difficult adolescence evolving into a successful independent-film career.
The author reflects on his youth with a bleak, steady wryness. His family is standard-issue dysfunctional: Grandma’s comradely advice includes, “It's much worse to get hit in the face with your own shit than with someone else’s. Remember that”; while Mom offers, “I hope there's sex in heaven ’cause I sure do like it!” Growing up in this hapless, hopeless, yet oddly secure environment, Chester describes himself as “a socially unskilled, constipated, Christian gay child,” painfully shy and the class joke. Things can't get worse, it seems, until he begins showing symptoms of Long-Face Syndrome, a genetic disorder that tests even Chester's capacity for black humor. Painful and humiliating, endless surgery gives him a new face, and his experience out there on the margin of things presumably gave him the ability to see the comedy in his predicament that distinguishes his recollections—while asides like “the only thing better than winning in this life is proving people wrong” hint at a bilious undercurrent. Out of these ruins an actor is born, well versed in nuances and the oblique. Chester calls up choice moments in his rise as a performer, remembering an early gig at which his parents “sat quietly as their only son sang songs about eating ass.” On the politics of being openly gay in Hollywood, he comments of belatedly candid celebrities that “coming out once you have a mansion and a Range Rover isn't really the same as putting your ass on the line from the get-go,” and notes the weirdness of losing gay roles to straight actors because he’s “not gay enough” or because the people at home need to know it’s “all just pretend.”
Intriguing midpoint autobiography sure to rouse curiosity about what the next half has in store.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28713-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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