An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the...
Stone’s first nonfiction book is a memoir of the decade when he came of age and absorbed experiences transformed into such memorable novels as Dog Soldiers (1974), Outerbridge Reach (1992) and Bay of Souls (2003).
It’s primarily a tale of people encountered and places seen, beginning in 1958 when Stone was a naval officer aboard a cargo ship performing geophysical research in latitudes approaching Antarctica. Despite side trips to Australia and South Africa, he ruefully concedes, “I felt very worldly, but in fact my international sophistication was severely limited.” The persona thus established became a paradoxical survival skill, as Stone moved on to the first of two tours in New York City’s journalistic world, marriage and fatherhood during lean years spent in New Orleans, back to New York, then to California (on a Stegner Writing Fellowship)—and into several drug-fueled years lived under the inspiration of Kerouac and the Beats and the saturnine tutelage of novelist-“prankster” Ken Kesey. Stone was in fact a passenger on the bus “Further” during its infamous 1964 cross-country joyride. Later, there were voyages to Paris and London, gigs with popular magazines (notably Esquire), the successful publication of his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, and its unsuccessful filming spearheaded by Paul Newman, and a 1968 trip to Vietnam as a correspondent for the short-lived British publication INK. The author relates several interesting stories, including one about the Mexican misadventure that gives this book its arresting title. Stone’s descriptive and rhetorical intensity and versatility are strongly imprinted on every page, but the book is not self-serving: As hard as he is on America’s puritanical legalism and reckless international adventuring, Stone is even more bluntly candid about the residue of his own ingenuous friendships and wasted youth (“. . . in the end we allowed drugs to be turned into a weapon against everything we believed in”).
An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the decades pass.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-019816-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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