Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Chuck Klosterman
- Publisher: Scribner
- Release Date: June 2006
- ISBN-10: 0743264460
- ISBN-13: 9780743264464
- List Price: $14.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryFor 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Within the span of twenty-one days, Chuck had three relationships end -- one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field. A man in Dickinson, North Dakota, explained to him why we have fewer windmills than we used to. He listened to the KISS solo albums and the Rod Stewart box set. At one point, poisonous snakes became involved. The road is hard. From the Chelsea Hotel to the swampland where Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane went down to the site where Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Chuck explored every brand of rock star demise. He wanted to know why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing...and what this means for the rest of us. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Zero focus
Rating:
Just not a very good book. It's supposed to be a lot about dead rock stars and what it all means to our hero-worshipping culture - especially when they're gone - but mostly it's a couple hundred pages of Chuck's drive across the country, some memories of old girlfriends, a weird meeting with one ex and a couple of dinners at places like Cracker Barrell. There's little about the dead rockers themselves, and this kind of "Chuck on Chuck" navel-gazing turned into a cliche for Chuck about, oh, six or seven years ago but he just can't give it up or come up with much new material.
A Different Kind of Coming of Age Story
Rating:
Chuck Klosterman is only 6-years younger than me. He is a pretentious hipster, a stoner and a self-conscious kid playing at being a grown up. To a degree, he reminded me of me at his age. He's also very funny and kept me entertained with this book.
The book's premise is Klosterman touring the US visiting the sites where various and sundry rock stars died. That is the basic structure, but the book is really about Klosterman and his relationships with current and ex girlfriends. (well, that and quite a bit of stoned stream of consciousness for our entertainment) By the end of the book, the tour itself was really only mentioned in passing while the relationships and stream of consciousness is now the main point.
At first I didn't get his point. Somewhere along the way I realized he was really discussing that period in all our lives when we realize we really are adults and that its time to put our 20's behind us. He used His Nemesis, his girlfriends and his old friends as illustrations of that period in our lives when everyone we know is broke and still trying to figure out what to do with life. Unlike a typical coming of age story, he is not a boy on his way to adulthood. Instead he is an adult learning that it's time to be a grown-up.
This is a highly entertaining book and well worth the read - even if one doesn't agree with his opinions on the top 3 bands of all time.
an entertaining one-time-only read, or a great way to kill time in an airport
Rating:
Chuck Klosterman has the kind of literary journalism style that is usualy only found on self-indulgant blogs or pop-culture magazines that people forget about once they reach drinking age. While his writing style will keep the reader interested, it seems he doesn't have the ability to write about anything without writing about himself first.
Reading the back cover, one would think that this book was about death, drugs, and rock n roll, however Chuck only mentions those things in between rambling about all the women he's loved before and why he can't let go of any of them. Future ex-girlfriends: beware. Chuck needs to let go and grow a pair.
If you're looking for a good rock 'n roll experience, go elsewhere. If you're looking for another reason to hate rock journalism, check this book out. If you happen to run into Chuck Klosterman on the street, punch him in the face for me. I'm sure he'll write about it.
Good Book
Rating:
I'm an audio production major, minoring in business, I'm not an extremely avid reader, but I LOVED this book. If you love music, and American culture as a whole, you will be entertained.
Enjoy!
Lay off the pot, Klosterman
Rating:
If this were an educational textbook titled "Why Marijuana is Stupid," I'd give it five stars.
Instead, this book purports to be an extended essay about the cultural significance of musician deaths, with all the profundity of two schoolgirls passing giggly notes back and forth. Imagine being stuck in a car for a month with the dumbest, most faux-pretentious stoner you know, the kind who tells disjointed anecdotes, can't hold a thought in his head for two minutes, and forms a fleeting, vapid bond with every waitress and hitchhiker he meets. This is the obnoxious traveling companion that 'Killing Yourself to Live' provides.
Klosterman admits upfront he is a pothead, though the bad writing makes that so painfully obvious. For example, the sentence, "At the moment, nobody in New York knows that I'm dead. And this is because I am not," is not nearly as deep and insightful as he'd like it to be. It's all Spiccoli-ish nonsense, and it's on every page. With every such attempted literary epiphany, you can practically hear his brain cells dying, one by one, of smoke inhalation. There is no logic or linear pattern to anything Klosterman writes about; it's just a pastiche of childhood memories and random visual observations (all of them uninteresting), and excruciating explications of every girl he has ever slept with (thankfully, it's not many).
What cheats the reader most is that this book has nothing to do with examining the relevance of dead rock stars. None whatsoever. It's just a thin premise for Klosterman to ramble sloppily and shamelessy on every banal thought passing through his head. He even uses the word ANYWAY (just like that, in all caps, all over the place) to create superficial transition between unrelated topics. An editor somewhere actually let him get away with this.
And sadly, Klosterman's idiot attempts at poignancy are not as bad as his judgmental attitude and musical arrogance. I (of course) expect this from someone who writes for Spin, but it's amped up to eleven in these pages. Klosterman is the worst type of scenester d-bag: you must listen to Obscure Band X to be hip. Anyone who listens to Interpol is unhip. On and on. Literally every page contains some sort of rude judgment about others' musical tastes. Yet Klosterman himself demonstrates some serious lapses in musical knowledge--he cannot remember Beyonce Knowles' name, referring to her only as "that religious woman with the perfect stomach from Destiny's Child," and admits he has to bring 600 CDs on his road trip because he is too stupid to figure out an iPod.
Basically, Killing Yourself to Live is akin to some of Elizabeth Wurtzel's worst books (i.e., `More, Now, Again'), which is beyond ironic, since Klosterman recounts meeting Wurtzel on page 50. So he must know that Killing Yourself to Live couldn't possibly live up to even the most pretentious of Wurtzel's works. Hell, this book wouldn't stand up to the novels of Dave Eggers, who at least knows his audience is comprised of gen-X lit snobs who want to look smart without actually having to put any thought into being intelligent.
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