Some extraordinary moments of great energy, emotion and even terror, too often recounted in very ordinary language.
Uneven debut memoir about the author’s more than 35 years in the bookselling business.
Born in Brooklyn, Werris was only four when her father’s career as a comedy writer (for Jackie Gleason, among others) took the family to California. She grew up loving books and planning to be an English teacher. In 1970, she took what she thought would be a part-time job at Pickwick Bookshop in L.A.; it turned into her profession. Werris writes about her experiences at each of the bookstores where she subsequently labored (all independent in those days), then tells how she segued into work as a publisher’s rep. She describes the colleagues she liked and respected; she disses those she didn’t. She remembers Charles Bukowski making a pass at her, and a one-night stand with Richard Brautigan. (Other than these encounters, she reveals little about her love life.) She met famous writers from Hunter S. Thompson to Michael Connelly, and she once “stalked” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in the street. Werris ends the “career” portion of her tale by explaining her latest gig as a freelance author escort. Her first assignment was accompanying Jonathan Franzen to several locations: She thought he was hot; they shared some quality time. Another narrative strand chronicles the decline of her father’s career and her mother’s frequent unhappiness. Yet another details her 1981 rape by a knife-wielding assailant who was never caught. Werris makes little effort to intertwine these strands, so the memoir never coheres. And she repeatedly relies on the weariest clichés, which diminish every sentence they inhabit.
Some extraordinary moments of great energy, emotion and even terror, too often recounted in very ordinary language.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1817-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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