A crude cautionary tale that lacks redemptive power.
A sad, sanguinary, and clumsy account of life and death among Chicago’s Puerto Rican street gangs.
Sanchez uses a pen name in this horrifying memoir to protect others, he claims, but since he admits to multiple felonies, including murder (no statute of limitations), it’s obviously for self-protection as well. Sanchez wishes to “provide some explanations for why kids join gangs” and hopes his efforts “can save the life of at least one kid.” He was born in Puerto Rico into an abusive home; his 74-year-old father did not last long, and his 16-year-old mother lived with a succession of monstrous men. Raped as a child by a male relative, Sanchez found life only worse after the “family” moved to Chicago when he was seven. His mother married Pedro (“fat, toothless, stinky, and loud”), and soon the boy was receiving regular beatings from both parents. As he grew older, he drifted into street life, had his initial sexual experience at 13 with a 35-year-old, began using drugs, and before long adopted the street code: “You have to learn to hurt people before they have a chance to hurt you.” Throughout, Sanchez relates events in remarkable detail, recalling names, dates, locations, and dialogue with a felicity that belies his repeated statements that he was high most of the time. (Was he keeping a diary?) The artless prose is rife with clichés (things hit him “like a ton of bricks”), usage errors (“between him and I” is a favorite locution), and inaccurate allusions (he thinks Frankenstein is the creature, not the creator). Far more serious than these stylistic flaws is the author’s failure to substantively reflect on his experience. His observations range from patent to ludicrous—after raping a girl, he concludes, “It seemed as if I was becoming coldhearted”—and he closes with the perfunctory advice that we must “take responsibility for our own neighborhoods.”
A crude cautionary tale that lacks redemptive power.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55652-401-3
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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