The itinerary of a hack writer's nightmarish journey through junkie hell. Stahl sets the prevailing tone with his prologue, in which he not only wakes up in a blood-soaked diaper after having a billiard- size cyst excised from his scrotum, but he also recalls shooting up heroin while his wife gave birth in the same hospital. Any readers remaining after this sunny preamble should know not to expect inspirational uplift. Stahl chronicles his writing career, which almost from the start found him contributing to glossy porn magazines. An editorial posting at Hustler took him to Los Angeles, where, after a stint in porn-film production, he began writing for a succession of TV series, including Alf, thirtysomething, and Moonlighting. Along with his successful career in TV he cultivated an intravenous narcotics habit that eventually left him destitute, virtually unemployable, and less than sane. Even in the extremity of his addiction, physically and creatively ravaged, he was still occasionally called up for television projects, and the grueling embarrassment of his attempts to feign sobriety make for excruciating reading. With an incessant, bitter jokiness that suggests Last Exit to Brooklyn as written by Paul Lynde, Stahl treats us to bathrooms splashed with blood, dawn excursions to the ghetto to score heroin, several agonizing attempts to kick the habit, scads of grindingly depressing solitary fixes, and an indistinct epiphany during the L.A. riots, which coincided with what was apparently his final withdrawal. The author recalls his lousy childhood, his father's suicide, his mother's furious neuroses, his stifled ``serious'' aspirations as a writer, and his disastrous marriage, suggesting that his entire life was so rotten that drug abuse fit right in, but his lifelong intentness on insuring his own misery remains a conundrum. Like a horrible accident, the memoir morbidly compels attention, but Stahl's self-excoriating wisecracks often trivialize the true ghastliness of his experience, reducing it to exploitation-flick flatness. (First serial to Esquire)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51794-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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