Grippingly provocative reading.
An award-winning journalist tells the story of one man’s struggle with a rare form of bipolar disorder called the Truman Show delusion.
Kevin Hall had it all: intelligence, money, and good looks as well as a deep love of sailing, a sport that defined his identity from boyhood. Hall excelled in school and, under the guidance of his hard-driving father, won many prestigious sailing awards. He then went to Brown University, where he double majored in math and French literature and also qualified to train with U.S. Sailing Team coaches. During his junior year, Hall suffered the first of many psychotic breaks. He also became aware of “The Director,” an illness-born figure that pressed him to do anything from travel out of town to walk into ongoing traffic for “The Show,” an imaginary reality TV broadcast intended for a worldwide audience. Hall finished college but not without facing more demands from the Director, encounters with the police, and stints in mental hospitals. Back home in California, he continued to train with the idea of one day fulfilling his Olympic dreams. Hall also battled to stay on medications he hated and overcome testicular cancer. He eventually married his college girlfriend, made the America’s Cup Team, and participated in the 2004 Athens Olympics, where he finished 11th. Yet, as journalist Pilon (The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, 2015) ably shows, every triumph was laced with struggle and feelings of monumental failure. He also faced the stern judgment of a father who believed his son was not trying hard enough to overcome his illness. After one especially bad manic episode, the elder Hall told his son he had “wasted time and hard-earned money to be part of Kevin’s indulgence.” The narrative, which is interspersed throughout with photos, interviews, and excerpts from Hall’s journals, reads like an in-depth character study of a morbidly delusional man. As it journeys through Hall’s illness, it also forces readers to consider the “sanity” of their own relationship to a media-saturated world.
Grippingly provocative reading.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-682-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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