A diary of devastation too good not to share.
A heartfelt and hyperliterate take on love as a mixtape.
Coviello (English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, 2013, etc.) tells the story of recovering from his life's greatest loss to date: the breakup of his marriage and family. A sheltered young English professor, the author met and married an older woman with children. Her affair with a co-worker a few years later shattered his world and left him in the precarious, nonlegal role of ex-stepfather to her two daughters. Coviello recounts memories in the present tense, and the 18 songs of the title prove closer to 30, with each chapter evoking a few pop songs that trigger memories surrounding the dissolution of his marriage. His sincerity is by turns insufferable and irresistible, but he is a true believer in the power of love and in the magic of certain pop songs to encapsulate, transform, infect, and heal. His personal compilation mixes tunes that remind him of his bewitchingly broken ex-wife, Evany, with songs that evoke his feelings as a suburban man learning to love and be loved by other people, plus a few tracks for the loyal friends who picked him up each time he collapsed in grief. With its convoluted syntax and attenuated musings about love and the inner life, Coviello’s style imitates his heroes Henry James and George Eliot, and reading his book feels a bit like finding a cache of letters from one close friend to another, with the writer casually unraveling on the page. Summing up one’s life in a list of carefully chosen tracks has developed into something of a microgenre, with pop songs serving as the madeleines for the last pre-digital generation. While some other High Fidelity–inspired memoirs undoubtedly “do” the music better, few outpace the grim vivacity of Coviello’s writing or match the depth of feeling he summons from the soundtrack of his own neuroses.
A diary of devastation too good not to share.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313233-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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