Entertaining in a spontaneous, distracting way. When it ends, though, and Klosterman slams shut the door to his head, most...
A transcontinental road trip mostly along the byways and back roads of Spin magazine writer Klosterman’s own head, resulting in an enjoyable, polyphonic interior monologue.
Early on, you get the warning: this will have all the earmarks of a “reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness” as Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, 2003, etc.) fields an assignment to visit the death sites of a number of rock ’n’ rollers, an odyssey that could yield some insight as to why death equals credibility and bestows messianic qualities in the world of rock, or why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing. And Klosterman does get around to taking a stab at the question—it says more about the fans than the artists—but he is chiefly interested in himself (though, happily, not in love with himself), engaging in extended riffs on his likes and dislikes in music and, most captivatingly, on the pathos of his love life (chimes of High Fidelity here, but readers will know that Klosterman has actually felt the sting, again and again). His brash honesty—“your entire existence as a rock critic is built around the process of reviewing your mail”—is shown both by an easeful descriptive talent as he drives from town to town, seeking the last place Duane Allman and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kurt Cobain and Holly-Valens-Bopper saw the light of day, and by slices of dark humor (as when his sister accidentally hit a cow with her car “and the old sleepy-eyed heifer went down like Frazier getting tagged by Foreman”). He can also be exasperatingly logorrheic, but road-trippers are on a ramble, after all.
Entertaining in a spontaneous, distracting way. When it ends, though, and Klosterman slams shut the door to his head, most of what went before melts into air.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6445-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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