by Lindsay Wincherauk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 2017
A potentially enlightening and darkly entertaining memoir undermined by weak prose.
In this memoir, Wincherauk (Seed’s Sketchy Relationship Theories, 2004) recalls a tumultuous past life and a personal search to discover what truly matters.
Just over 100 pages into this disconcerting remembrance, the Canadian author declares, “Four fucking months—only four months had passed. BREAKUP—SUICIDE—CANCER—ALIENATION—INFIDELITY—DEATH—CANCER—DEATH—DEATH—AND—FUCKING DEATH; had entered my life.” Sadly, for the author, nicknamed “Seed” by his friends, this pattern of pain made up the first portion of his life. The former bartender from Vancouver says his first childhood memory was discovering his brothers “chanting together in a continuous loop”: “Lindsay, we are going to get you. Lindsay, you are not one of us.” Two of his brothers, he says, tried to convince him to “stick [his] dinner knife in a wall socket.” Wincherauk's difficult relationship with his family led him to escape into sports, including football. Yet despite small victories, fate always seemed to deal him a bad hand. He lost multiple friends and family members to cancer, which he personifies as “THE BIG C,” a sadistic killer. He led a life as a drifter, punctuated by drunken days and nights in dive bars, drug experimentation, failed relationships, and failed business ventures, but it also included travel to numerous far-flung destinations such as France and Jamaica, and an encounter with the Dalai Lama. The book is part memoir and part self-help guide for those who've had similar experiences, and it often takes on an appropriate tone of mocking self-awareness: “I vomited in my mouth a little bit when I typed the last line.” Stylistically, however, the memoir is a chaotic and choppy read, in no small part due to Wincherauk’s idiosyncratic tendency toward one-sentence paragraphs. This, coupled with a coarse tone throughout (“Having to defend my emotions was fucking sucking”), may deter many readers. That said, it’s difficult not to admire the author’s ability to face the darkest aspects of his existence head-on and remain ebullient. Black-and-white and color photos are included.
A potentially enlightening and darkly entertaining memoir undermined by weak prose.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78693-511-3
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Austin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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