Or, “How Bill and Ted’s Self-Indulgent Adventure Became William and Theodore’s Moving Memoir.”
“Or,” as the subtitle puts it, “the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling YANKEES SUCK T-Shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq, Where They Became Employed by the Occupation in Jobs for Which They Lacked Qualification and Witnessed Much That Amazed and Disturbed Them.”
Two feckless BoSox fanatics and first-time authors travel to Baghdad, where they manage to find some feck and do some good. They don’t begin as characters many readers will like. (For simplicity’s sake, LeMoine narrates their memoir.) When they decided to go to Iraq in October 2003, prompted by a heartbreaking-for-Boston World Series, they were young and dumb, full of early-20s certainty that they would never die and that just about everyone else was an idiot. But amid ruin and chaos in one of the most dangerous places on earth, they discovered that they liked to help the helpless, they realized their frailty, they . . . well, matured (sort of). The authors are certainly unafraid to admit their weaknesses, characterizing their 2003 selves as stupid, ignorant and gullible. What they did was indeed jaw-dropping in its chutzpah. In Jordan, they boarded a creaking bus to Baghdad, where they weaseled their way into working for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Soon, they were operating a charity they named HAND (Humanitarian Aid Network of Distribution) by day and downing drugs—alcohol and valium were their preferred downers—by night. Each day they drove out of the Green Zone (the high-security safety area) into what they called the Red Zone, where they distributed boxes of used clothing to swarms of children. They figured out how to circumvent or manipulate the military presence, how to communicate with Iraqis, where to find the best tobacco and the most drunken parties. When the U.S. shut down some opposition media, sectarian violence began to intensify, especially after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted. In Jordan, the authors got in some scuffles, and the U.S. military cut them loose. Back home, they heard about the violent deaths of two friends in Baghdad. Some of the war-zone madness is reminiscent of Catch-22; some of the sorrow and tragedy is too.
Or, “How Bill and Ted’s Self-Indulgent Adventure Became William and Theodore’s Moving Memoir.”Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-091-2
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
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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