A hard-luck tale that never asks for pity.
Pearson’s memoir is even more horrifying than the cold-blooded killer she portrays on The Wire.
Born a cross-eyed crack baby in East Baltimore, the author was soon in foster care. Her mother paid infrequent visits (locking her in a closet and selling her clothes to buy crack during one of them) and then stopped coming altogether. Her doting and religious foster parents did their best, but their neighborhood was riddled with drug dealers, and Pearson, an industrious but fidgety tomboy, couldn’t resist the siren call of the streets. She witnessed her first murder in sixth grade and soon acquired the moniker “Snoop,” a personal arsenal and a rep for being dead-eyed crazy. At 15, she fatally shot a woman who came after her with a bat; she got a relative break with a sentence of only five years. In prison, Pearson got her GED and stayed out of trouble. She even had a moment of revelation when the workings of the universe were at least briefly made clear. Her loving relationship (of a sort) with a prison guard provides one of the narrative’s less-expected moments, and the subject of Pearson’s homosexuality is handled with surprisingly unconventional directness. With the help of veteran co-author David Ritz (Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott, 2002, etc.), she tells her story in prose that has the same laconic, hypnotic clarity with which she delivers her lines on The Wire. Having been dealt such a raw hand by life, Pearson’s happenstance discovery in a bar by an actor on the show makes a welcome end to this captivating, brutally honest tale of a life that came perilously close to being a complete waste.
A hard-luck tale that never asks for pity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-446-19518-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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