With a little suspension of disbelief on his or her own part, even the hardest-nosed reader will find Guerrero’s decidedly...
A Southern California PBS journalist explores her relationship with her disturbed, likely schizophrenic father.
Things went south in her father’s life, Guerrero writes in this debut memoir, when a half sister edged him out of a managerial job in the family meat business. But his newfound addiction to hiding with an early-generation computer wasn’t the first odd thing he’d done; as Guerrero relates, he’d also tapped her mother’s phone in an act of jealousy—but also a fairly sophisticated bit of technological hacking. A mad genius and wild thinker, he got steadily worse: “The rare times Papi emerged from his bedroom, he sat on our living room leather couch, burping, staring at the turned-off television.” Then came the self-medication and the disappearances south of the border in episodes that, as Guerrero recounts them, had an alarming oddness—e.g., he wrapped his headrest in aluminum foil to keep from being zapped by unusual rays, then ran into an army checkpoint that, thankfully, failed to remark on the drugs and open bottles scattered throughout the cab. Investigating her father’s madness and charting his travels, Guerrero became a little unsettled herself: “Life is an accident,” she writes. “Any encounter with meaning is a delusion.” Her path also included some of that self-medication and plenty of that decenteredness. Guerrero relates all of this effectively, though there’s a grim repetitiveness to some of the madness. Readers may take issue with some of her suspensions of disbelief. In the end, she seems to think that it’s entirely possible her father had shamanic powers and that a line of sorcery extended throughout her family in Mexico, which lands us in Carlos Castañeda territory as mediated by a few hits of ecstasy.
With a little suspension of disbelief on his or her own part, even the hardest-nosed reader will find Guerrero’s decidedly centrifugal memoir fascinating.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59239-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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