Whiteout : Lost in Aspen

Rating:
Summary: NOT BAD
Review: A YOUNG MAN BUMS IN ASPEN AND DSCOVERES LIFE IS OKA

Rating:
Summary: Not nearly as good as his others
Review: I became a fan of this author after reading Newjack, his account of his year as a corrections officer at Sing Sing. Next I read Coyote, where the author joined up with Mexican illegal immigrants and lived their life in order to write his book. Now White-Out...hmmm. I found it pretty boring. Living in Aspen, the author is first a taxi driver, and then he moves on to other jobs, but all we read is about how this celebrity was seen here, another one attended this party with a new girlfriend, another few famous people belong to the same health club he joined. Oh wow. Not exactly riveting stuff. Skip this book but don't give up on the author - his other books I've read get five stars. (By the way, the previous reviewer, Sartin, was writing about the book Coyote, so how her review ended up on this page is a mystery!)

Rating:
Summary: Another brillian work by the talented Connover.
Review: Once again, Ted Connover came through with a completely unique glimpse of a society few people are able to witness. With an amazing gift for immersing himself in different cultures, Ted provides a glimpse into the mostly ultra-rich lifestyle of the Aspenites. I found this novel to be thoroughly entertaining and thought provoking.

Rating:
Summary: Atypical and disappointing
Review: Ted Conover has a distinctive modus operandus. He writes ethnographic studies of disadvantaged people by becoming part of the population as much as possible. He began, as a college student, becoming a hobo and riding the rails, as documented in "Rolling Nowhere". In his brilliant "Coyotes", he's amazingly successful at integrating himself into the illegal alien population, crossing secretly into the USA several times with Mexican migrant laborers. Most readers will know him from his recent "Newjack", where he becomes a prison guard and Sing-Sing to comment on the lives of guards and inmates.

"Whiteout" is the odd man out in Conover's oeuvre. We're on familiar territory initially - Conover is a cab driver in Aspen, spying on the lives of tourists while living the life of a working stiff. But he never fully commits, living with a wealthy friend in a palatial mansion, and later house-sitting for another millionaire. Later, he becomes a reporter for the local paper, and most of the book reads like extended versions of the newspaper stories he had opportunity to cover. We get a number of interesting pictures of life in Apsen, from ski bums to society madams, to an odd interlude in northern Florida with a former drug runner who _used_ to be based out of Aspen.

Perhaps the shotgun approach is meant to mirror the diversity and complexity of the interaction of social classes in Aspen. Or perhaps Conover saw an opportunity to turn a year off in Apsen into a book with a major publisher. Either way, the reader is left wishing that Conover would pick someone - anyone - to identify with, profile and feature. Instead, we get a mishmash that could only be appealing to readers interested in Apsen or the celebrities who live there. Skip this one and pick up any of his other books instead.

Rating:
Summary: An ethnography of "paradise"
Review: Ted Conover, who's known for his looks at the grittier side of life, tried something different in this book: a look at privilege and pleasure as they are enshrined in Aspen, CO. I think that writing about the rich is probably harder than it sounds--for one thing, the average reader doesn't have a lot of sympathy, and for another, most social analysis is directed at the less fortunate. But Conover looks, mostly seriously, at a place that is fairly silly, and the result is Insight of a very high grade.

The focus goes both tight and wide, the observations are sharp but not dismissive; we find ourselves in the company of starlets and busboys alike, and presented with quite a few moral dilemmas (is it RIGHT to live this way? how come everybody in the real world looks less attractive after Aspen?). Conover's candor alone makes Whiteout worth the price of admission. If your soul is lingering in Sing Sing after reading Newjack, this Rocky Mountain sojourn could be just the thing you need ...