Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation.
National Poetry Slam finalist Carney’s memoir of his troubled upbringing, drug addiction and eventual grace.
Addicts often refer to a moment of epiphany, when, at their lowest point, they experience a feeling of clarity that puts their disease into perspective. The author vividly describes his moment as a fortuitous brush with death, when, after bingeing on crack, he was driving with a prostitute and a car careened out of control, almost crashing into him at high speed. Dazed, Carney helped the other driver and noticed a crack pipe in his pocket. That man, tossed from his vehicle but seemingly unhurt, could have been him. So begins Carney’s tale of redemption, which is told through time-traveling vignettes that alternate between his fraught childhood and adolescence and the manic, drug-addled events immediately leading to his moment of “grace.” There is a sense of self-indulgence in Carney’s recollections of his lurid self-destruction, but his memory serves to contrast the extremes of his depravity with a newfound meaning in life. If addicts need an excuse to justify their excess, Carney’s list would probably dwarf most. Growing up, his family life was classically dysfunctional. He had a teenage mother and abusive father and teenage years of delinquency, homophobia and criminal apprenticeship. Behind all that, however, was a love of words and reading. Carney even fondly recalls his first encounter with poetry in which he smuggled a book out of the school library after checkout time had ended, later thinking after his first marriage ended after nine months, the “only relationship I believed I needed was with poetry.” His dedication to poetry would lead him to four National Poetry Slam finals and speaking gigs at colleges to decry the types of bigotry and hate that had led him astray.
Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1617753015
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Kaylie Jones/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
