Unprepossessing but also winning snapshots of varying (non)importance from an unremarkable life that pretends to be nothing...
More autobiographical sketches, in no particular order, from Chicago graphic artist Brown (Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations, 2007, etc.).
From the previously published first chapter, “These Things These Things,” through the finale, “A Tiny Piece of Myself,” the prolific author covers roughly the last four years of his small-scale experiences. A reader would have to be well acquainted with his personal life to see much of a progression from one year to the next; Brown’s graphic recollections can seem random and ordinary, and no doubt that’s intentional. The always hirsute and bedraggled artist makes the rounds in one story after another: drawing at Earwax coffeeshop, selling CDs at Barnes & Noble, listening to music, dealing with his cat, having touch-and-go romances that involve lots of waiting for phone calls and parsing of signals, not to mention negotiating dilemmas like whether to romance “smartie” or “cutie.” The art is lo-fi in the extreme, with cramped framing and people who look like the sort of hunched caricatures another artist might doodle in the margins before moving on to the main event. The book’s dialogue will win no awards, resorting often to a Seinfeld-ian blah blah blah method of elision. Chapters like the long-winded “Missing the Mountains,” in which he goes hiking and plays Scrabble with a friend, sometimes give Brown’s memoir the air of a chronically low-achieving slacker’s take on the form—i.e., exert as little effort as possible. But the bulk of the pieces charm with their off-kilter humor and sad-sack tales of the lovelorn, such as the brilliantly self-deprecating mini-essay, “How to Meet a Girl.”
Unprepossessing but also winning snapshots of varying (non)importance from an unremarkable life that pretends to be nothing but. Could easily appeal to those new to the genre.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4946-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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