A solid sophomore outing that will have readers looking for more from this talented author.
Humorist Key (English/Savannah Coll. of Art and Design) follows up his Thurber Prize–winning memoir, The World’s Largest Man (2015), with a book about the quiet indignities of being an author.
In his second book, following his collection of hilarious essays about his father, the acerbic and brutally honest author chronicles the abject lows and soulful highs of becoming a published writer. In gritty detail, Key ably deconstructs the messy arc of the writing and publishing process. Inspired by Douglas Adams but living under the pendulous weight of artists like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, the author was in his late 20s before he finally committed to his dream of writing “a funny book.” Tolerated by his eternally patient and lovingly sarcastic wife and three daughters, Key achieved his dream when HarperCollins bought the book for over $300,000 after a seemingly aggressive bidding war. The tales are consistently funny, as the author chronicles how he took his mother and daughters on a seemingly endless book tour while experiencing visions of being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air and learning about the mortification of bookstore events. For all of his biting wit, Key’s love of writing is what shines through in the end: “A story is an old-fashioned treasure hunt, and what makes it so very hard for the writer is that when you start to write, you don’t necessarily know the nature of the treasure or even what the map looks like. All you need is a human with an empty place inside them they’re hoping to fill. That’s what a story is. We turn the page because we all have the hole in us, too, and we’re all trying to fill it and we’re hoping the story will give us some ideas about how to do that.”
A solid sophomore outing that will have readers looking for more from this talented author.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-284330-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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