Retains little of gonzo journalism’s original fun and destructive joy.
The original art director of all things gonzo, Steadman recalls 30 years of mythic adventures with the Master.
The Welsh graphic artist first encountered Hunter S. Thompson, who greeted him with a shot of Mace, in 1970. Their collaboration on a report about the depravity of the Kentucky Derby (now a collector’s item) marked the legendary birth of a special form of journalism. The pair went on to cover the America’s Cup, the Ali-Foreman match in Zaire, life in Hawaii and the 1972 political conventions. They produced their masterwork, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in 1971. Steadman had no share in that copyright, an omission he didn’t notice then but is plenty mad about now (which might explain his dubious claim that “the book was noticed mainly for the drawings”). Up through Thompson’s suicide last year, theirs was not an easy relationship. Hunter’s feet stank, his friend reports. He hated Steadman’s attempts at writing, and “Hunter’s friendship was also a business agreement. . . . He was much more into deals than personal affection.” Yet Steadman chronicles three decades of bonhomie: swigging Wild Turkey at Owl Farm, driving dangerously, indulging in lots of dope and not a few guns. (They even do some shooting with William Burroughs.) Much of this memoir consists of letters to and from Thompson. Relying on repetitive, puerile, insult comedy, the correspondence is hardly on par with Bernard Shaw’s or even Groucho Marx’s missives. Bitching about the state of the world and listing America’s faults, the author begins in this text to sound like an old man wandering and cursing, lost in a shopping mall.
Retains little of gonzo journalism’s original fun and destructive joy.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101282-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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