Just once, Jonathan, let go and try writing with both fists.
Clever, self-involved performer and author Ames (What’s Not to Love?, 2000, etc.) can’t seem to let himself alone, mentally or physically, and he gleefully tells us all about it in this gathering of newspaper essays, journal entries, fiction, and miscellany.
His solipsistic record of naughty adventures home alone or out with ladies of the night, porn stars, tranny hookers, and various kinky people is certainly not Mr. Pepys's kind of diary. Ames is Alexander Portnoy come to life: lascivious, overwrought, and funny, though not nearly as funny as Portnoy, even if he does label his personality disorder as “Comic-Depressive.” His giddy depression and manic misery are always first-person, up-front, and in-your-face. He is partial to drinking and shtupping, drag queens and masturbation, beautiful breasts and behinds, oral sex and phone sex. Even the putative book reviews are self-centered, with a determinedly raunchy affect. If you haven’t heard about his pal’s invention of a sexual artifact called “the mangina,” you haven’t been paying attention—and you’re lucky. Granted, Ames can write. His recounting of his adventures as “The Herring Wonder” (a supposed incarnation of a Lower East Side Jewish boxer), a visit to a gathering of S&M groupies, and a purloined manuscript demonstrate his talent. But all the palaver about anatomy (male, female, or indeterminate) and all the stream of consciousness concerning the diverse uses of body parts (his or not) are essentially variations on one note and, as such, become a tad tedious. Though Ames mentions his editors, his text seems never to have crossed any editor’s desk. It isn’t entirely trash talk, but it isn’t mainstream material that will please the local Watch and Ward Society or General Ashcroft. For the rest of us, as Ames says, “When something’s not your hobby, you can only take so much”—for instance, the author’s report that he needs to grasp his penis when he is writing.
Just once, Jonathan, let go and try writing with both fists.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56025-375-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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