A middling memoir of a young man’s attempts to live as a modern-day ascetic.
A recent college grad discovers how to live life and pay off his student loans at the same time.
After graduating from college with $32,000 in student loans and no lucrative job offers, Ilgunas decided to take an unconventional approach to paying off his debt. He embarked on an epic road trip, including stops in Alaska to clean rooms in a tourist camp and in post-Katrina Mississippi, where he worked clearing debris. With his room and board paid for and few distractions, Ilgunas was able to pay off his loans in under three years. He then decided to attend graduate school. To avoid incurring more debt, he knew he had to keep his living expenses to an extreme minimum. A Ford Econoline van solved that problem, and Ilgunas managed to live in a campus parking lot for two years. Ilgunas’ story gained traction when it appeared as an article in Salon; the novelty of his lifestyle may appeal to a generation of overly indebted and underemployed college grads. On his journeys, he met a diverse cast of characters, yet, despite a brief relationship with a young woman, his was a lonely life; socializing was just too expensive. Ilgunas has some interesting stories to tell, but his writing style is clichéd at best and more often clunky and rambling. The pacing is further weakened by loosely researched generalizations about the problems with “society”—e.g., comments like, “while I worried that my parents might get laid off, I couldn’t have cared less about this ‘Great Recession’ ” exhibit an annoying self-absorption that sets the tone for much of this memoir. And while Ilgunas tries to reference Thoreau—imagining his “vandwelling” life as a kind of transcendental experience—his story is really about the crises facing American higher education. That a student can’t get a degree without sacrificing basic human rights like food, clothing, shelter and love makes this story a tragic one.
A middling memoir of a young man’s attempts to live as a modern-day ascetic.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02883-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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