Some will appreciate Alexander’s recollection of rap’s bling-bling ’90s, while others will be haunted by the portrait of his...
A mix of young-black-journalist memoir and rural family history, told with plenty of analytical flossing.
Alexander introduces himself by noting of his Sandusky, Ohio, upbringing, “Niggas always accusing Buckeye niggas of acting white, but that’s a small-town thing.” His debut’s most charming moments depict the conflicting influences on his childhood of his strict mother and his mostly absent father, locally notorious for gangster glamour and an abbreviated singing career. Delbert appears only sporadically in his son’s life, but provides this memoir’s strongest element: Alexander adeptly dramatizes the hard equations that befell generations of African-American men, ranging in Delbert’s instance from youthful addiction, violence, and imprisonment to humiliating stints at factory work and selling Confederate flags. Far less powerful is Alexander’s exhaustive evocation of his own post-adolescence, a druggy idyll of underground radio, school-newspaper controversies, interracial sex, and slacker angst—hardly novel memoir material, notwithstanding numerous references to and encounters with West Coast rappers. His rapid success as a California-based freelance journalist is recalled in aggressive prose that combines hip-hop freestyling with Mailer-esque affect. Yet this personal narrative devolves into a dreary final third, as Alexander’s relationship with his long-suffering wife deteriorates and he concentrates on racking up human-interest stories on “difficult” athletes like Alonso Spellman and Latrell Sprewell. The author seems incapable of writing about the cultural milieu he loves without projecting his own persona as its epochal center, and his striving to be “the only hip-hop journalist who mattered” becomes increasingly wearying. Despite various shrewd observations (e.g., terming sports journalists “the ultimate hangers on”), Alexander comes off by the end as yet another under-40 culture flack with mutational self-esteem.
Some will appreciate Alexander’s recollection of rap’s bling-bling ’90s, while others will be haunted by the portrait of his delinquent father.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4602-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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