A grating collection from a poor-man’s Howard Stern.
An explicit collection of stories from the host of The All Out Show on Sirius.
On Angelini’s radio show, guests are likely to do anything. One—“a little punk rock, porn chick”—urinated on him as foreplay, which must have made for great radio. The author originally self-published this book, though apparently there was enough demand to attract a publisher. Nearly every one of these stories involves impersonal sex either aided or thwarted by drugs that overcome the inherent numbness of the act or reinforce it. “Drug sex is great,” he writes. “The only thing better is love sex. But if you can’t get that, drug sex is a nice consolation prize.” There is little or no “love sex” in these pages, though Angelini expresses plenty of love for his daughter, who lives with her mother, whom he misses. He dedicates the book to both of them and claims that he “figured it out too late.” And what did he figure out? It’s hard to tell, though he plainly has something of the romantic in him: “Maybe some lady will pick me up, dust me off, and see me for the man I am and not the whore I’ve been acting like.” By the end of this series of short chapters, there is no sense that he is closer to any sort of transformation, though he seems as benumbed by the depravity of a life without purpose or pleasure as readers will be. As for humor, here’s a taste: “Every time I go to Flint, I end up at LLT’s, this grimy little strip club on Saginaw. They do a five-dollar lap dance, and I know you shouldn’t go bargain hunting for your tattoos or sex workers, but I just can’t turn down a good deal….Five bucks in Flint is like ten bucks in Detroit. It’s the Tijuana of the Midwest.”
A grating collection from a poor-man’s Howard Stern.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476789309
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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