A humor book far more mean than funny.
Calling all Tucker Max fans: McInnes (Street Boners: 1,764 Hipster Fashion Jokes, 2010, etc.) delivers a monumentally unfunny memoir of being a jerk.
The author was born and raised in a boring town in Canada, the son of two “bombastic drunk Scots.” There he engaged in typical teenage hijinks like dropping acid and figuring out who could drive the drunkest. Seeing promise in such pursuits, he soon became a mainstay of the regional punk scene, forming the band Anal Chinook, and drinking, puking and having lots of sex. University led him to Montreal and his eventual founding of the magazine Vice. When the magazine became an international hit, McInnes sold it for a large sum of money. However, the book isn’t as much a linear narrative as a pastiche of the author’s many outrageous experiences. First and foremost is sex with “bitches”—or as McInnes writes, “[people] you jerk off into.” In one bit of debauchery he nearly pushed a woman’s head into the toilet while having sex with her. Then there’s the time he gave himself an STD by swallowing his own semen. Another time he pretended to be a “retard,” and people actually believed he was retarded and treated him with kindness. There are plenty of stories about drinking and fighting, and he even got beat up by a “faggot.” Occasionally there’s a story that is actually funny (the time his mother got stoned) or poignant (being in New York during 9/11). But while the author pictures himself a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson, there’s a thick line between Thompson’s inspired lunacy and the insipid callousness offered here. McInnes did eventually settle down, however, and got married; in marriage, he writes, “women become human beings for the first time ever.” Inspiring stuff.
A humor book far more mean than funny.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1417-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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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