A tone of whininess undermines the author’s sharp perceptions.
Chronicles of fame, mishaps, and assorted grievances.
In 1986, Janowitz (They Is Us, 2009, etc.) became “semi-famous,” she writes, with the publication of the story collection Slaves of New York, putting her in the company of the Literary Brat Pack along with Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. “Here’s what we had in common,” she writes: “the fact that our books were not supposed to become big sellers and were never expected to get any attention, but actually did.” Janowitz continued to publish novels and stories, some made into films; she attended glitzy, star-filled parties and counted among her celebrity friends Joan Rivers (“warm, yet driven to achievement”), Lou Reed (“easy to talk to”), Andy Warhol, with whom she dined a few times a week, and Elizabeth Hardwick, her teacher at Barnard College. Janowitz’s frank, sometimes funny, often repetitious memoir imparts tart literary gossip but focuses mostly on her hardscrabble life: living in poverty with her mother after her parents divorced and, even as a successful writer, always worried about money. Homes included a “former meat locker” in Manhattan, a claustrophobic trailer with no running water, and a crumbling house in upstate New York, which she shared with a bunch of rowdy poodles. The author recounts her unstable, philandering father, a psychiatrist addicted to marijuana who sent her hate letters each time she visited; her sullen teenage daughter; and her mother, whom she moved from one nursing home to another as her dementia worsened and whose decrepit house she spent years cleaning out. After her mother died, her vindictive brother besieged her with angry emails threatening to charge her with embezzlement from their mother’s retirement funds. Fearful, irritating, and needy, the author tends to see the dark side of every experience. She glosses over posh travel assignments, for example, to detail an abortive effort to interview a belligerent hit man.
A tone of whininess undermines the author’s sharp perceptions.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239132-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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