Fear and Loathing on the Kona coast of Hawaii: Thompson trots out his familiar act as Yahoo-anarchist-poète maudit—but despite a few inspired fits of zaniness, and some appropriately phantasmagoric drawings by Ralph Steadman, it just doesn't work. The Thompson-Steadman vision of Las Vegas made powerful symbolic sense because its neo-Boschian monstrosities seemed like a fun-house mirror of late 1960s America. Here too we get the (literally) incredible boozing and drugs, the violent antics of the journalist (assigned to cover the Honolulu Marathon) gone haywire, the sardonic put-on of outpigging the pigs. This time Thompson fancies himself the reincarnation of the Hawaiian god Lono, a brutal deity in charge of "the season of abundance and relaxation," who sailed away on a three-cornered raft promising to return. In 1779 when Captain Cook dropped anchor in Kealakekua Bay, the eager natives took him for Lono—though not for long. Thompson continually toys with the figure of Cook (as an archetypal arrogant imperialist, quite properly hacked to pieces) and interlards his ravings with many quotations from Richard Hough's The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook—a far more interesting text. Finally, after ignoring the Marathon ("Why do those buggers run? Why do they punish themselves. . . for no prize at all?") and enduring three weeks of furious tropical storms and sodden misery, Thompson saves his strange vacation by landing a 308 lb. marlin hours before flying back to Colorado. The one photo in the book shows Thompson (barely distinguishable from any other lei-garlanded tourist) grasping the dorsal fin of his catch in cool, self-mocking triumph: Lono has arrived. But he hasn't—just an occasionally amusing Haole and generally insufferable wise-ass.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1983
ISBN: 3822848972
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
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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