Falls at times into the egotistical tone of the self-obsessed addict, but for the most part Johnson’s admirably direct prose...
Hard-bitten memoir of a young Englishman’s abusive childhood and quick descent into years of addiction and homelessness.
Growing up in a working-class household fraught with physical violence, drunkenness and chaotic behavior, the author was brutalized by what he beheld and wasted little time in indulging in more of the same. Johnson describes a father sick with drink who couldn’t touch his children without hitting them and a mother whose fanatical religious beliefs helped her ignore the fact that her husband beat her and the kids while driving them into poverty. Johnson’s broken home life marked him as easy prey for sexual predators outside the home, further shattering a skewed psyche. He was shoplifting and drinking by the time he was eight, doing hard drugs not long after. Adolescence and young adulthood were a whirl of increasingly dangerous behavior, from loutish banging about with the lads, petty thievery and short jail sentences to endless days of clubbing and drugging in rave-addicted 1990s England. His chaotic youthful behavior wasn’t so different from that of many contemporaries, but Johnson’s disastrous upbringing left him unable to downshift into adult society afterward. Nothing stopped the downward spiral—not even the 1996 birth of his son, addicted just like both parents. In the horrific final stretch before he cleaned up, Johnson was homeless on the streets of London, addicted to a witches’ brew of drugs and seemingly unable to stop his plunge toward death. Clean since July 2000, he is now a special advisor to Prince Charles.
Falls at times into the egotistical tone of the self-obsessed addict, but for the most part Johnson’s admirably direct prose provides a straightforward, honest account of what happens to a life when all the brakes come off.Pub Date: May 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933648-82-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
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