A humorous love letter to a dying vocation.
Grobaty’s (Growing Up in Long Beach, 2013, etc.) memoir chronicles a four-decade career as a Southern California newspaperman.
In 1976, the author, armed with only his brief experience on a community college newspaper, applied for employment with his hometown paper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Over the following decades, he worked his way up from copyboy to veteran journalist, holding a wide range of reporting and columnist positions. His book is a personal and professional memoir as well as a good-natured testament to the decline of print journalism: “We don’t buy ink by the barrel these days,” Grobaty writes, commenting on declining circulation. “We pick up a half-gallon on the way to work.” As a journeyman reporter, he observed the last days of highflying, hard-drinking, mid-20th-century newspaper culture. His establishment as a daily columnist coincided with the slow decline of the industry, and in middle age, he witnessed the capitulation of daily print media to the Internet. Eventually, Grobaty makes a sort of reluctant peace with the digital era, confident that his calling of columnist transcends the medium of print. At times, he ventures into the content of his columns—such as one on the relative danger of local fleabag highway motels—which meander away from the narrative arc; some chapters include reprints of entire columns. But for the author, there’s little separation between those columns and his life: “You write columns for a certain number of years and the daily snippets start to weave together as your sprawling memoirs.” For the reader, Grobaty’s quick, clever prose—honed over decades of deadlines—is a pleasure to follow wherever it leads. The loose biographical structure and distinct chapters allow readers to enjoy the volume straight through or as an anthology that one may pick up at different points. Overall, this book will make a pleasant Sunday read for anyone looking to return to the pre-blog joys of opening a freshly delivered morning paper, pouring a cup of coffee, and reading the musings of a favorite local columnist.
A humorous love letter to a dying vocation.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941932-06-3
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Brown Paper Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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