“I can’t believe it all just stops.” Barton died in September 2002, leaving behind this appreciable scrapbook of his life.
Dying from stomach cancer at 51, the late media entrepreneur Barton looked back over his hungry, high-speed life to tender some personal truths.
There is a powerful disconnect in these pages between the studied calm of Barton’s closing months and his earlier life as an admittedly outsized alpha male, a striver and overachiever. “I’m just trying to give a candid report on what I’ve experienced and continue to experience, to map the progress toward my own little death. I don’t pretend it’s been tidy,” he says, and yet it is a fairly tidy summation. (Though Shames [The Naked Detective, 2000, etc.] must have helped Barton compose his thoughts, his presence is invisible except for short, eliding chapters. He takes no credit except to place his name first in the author order.) Barton’s final job was with Liberty Media, a company that shaped the cable television landscape. He grew into a rich man, but before all the money there was a life that fit snuggly into the zeitgeist of the ’60s: ski bum, card dealer, musician, political forays, and also being son to a father who died young, alerting Barton to his own potentially short lifespan. A prickly adolescent, he learned to manage the energy, letting it “ripen into what I think of as creative irreverence.” He pushed himself, and, in doing so, learned a few lessons that he wished to pass along, especially to his children: “Recognizing the difference between a dumb risk and a smart one; understanding when you need a change of direction, and having the guts to do it.” Certainly his insights are subjective, not a few quite filmy, though others ring with common sense. As Shames remarks, “The overriding theme was always the idea of becoming ready. Ready to live; ready to die.”
“I can’t believe it all just stops.” Barton died in September 2002, leaving behind this appreciable scrapbook of his life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57954-688-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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