Dull and uninspiring—could definitely use some of Freddie Mercury’s camp to liven things up.
Graphic memoir by a British lad who grew up obsessed by Queen and never grew out of it.
Eleven-year-old Dawson washed up on American shores in 1986, when he was interested in little beside battling with his sister over who was more all-important musically: Queen (his vote) or George Michael/Wham! (her weak competition). The cartoonist, creator of the comic-book series Gabagool!, strings together various life memories from an insecure childhood to an only mildly less insecure young adulthood, tracking along the way his obsession with Queen. High points included Dawson performing Queen songs at a talent show; the low point was probably being mocked by schoolmates after Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991. Credit should go to the author for not trying to make his life mirror too closely that of the complex (some would say pompous) arena-rock band—he doesn’t overdo his metaphor. Dawson’s artwork has a similarly unassuming quality, its slightly exaggerated style occasionally mindful of Peter Bagge’s Hate comics, but without the punk extremism. Occasional interludes imagine episodes in the career of George Michael (perhaps as a nod to the author’s sister?), but for the most part Dawson offers an uninterrupted flow of biographical data. Even though he’s supposedly the world’s greatest Queen fan, he never makes readers understand exactly what the band means to him. Long before the book is finished, his obsession with Queen seems more like a convenient hook than a topic he intends to explore in any depth.
Dull and uninspiring—could definitely use some of Freddie Mercury’s camp to liven things up.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-476-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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