Grittier than anything we've read about [Bourdain] before ... Here are exact, disturbing details about his suicide. His heroin habit is recounted. So is his frequent coldness to many who loved and worked with him ... Leerhsen’s book...has a lot of people trying to join Bourdain on the couch, ideally without his trousers, and thus has more adrenaline and feels truer to life ... He’s not here, though, to discredit or dismiss his subject. His admiration for Bourdain is nearly always apparent. It’s hard to say if Bourdain would have liked this book. Either way, I suspect he would have admired the author’s guts ... Down and Out in Paradise is not the most subtle thing you’ll ever read ... His Bourdain book goes down like a mass-market rock bio ... I’d have loved it if I were 17 ... The older me, the one who prefers wine to fizz, wishes Leerhsen had more to say about things like: a) the elite and vernacular food worlds pre- and post-Bourdain; b) how Bourdain walked a moral tightrope across the conventions of travel writing and reporting, no mean feat for a wealthy white man in skinny jeans; and c) the sense that he was at the vanguard, more so than even the most scrutinized actors, of a new type of American masculinity ... You can’t have everything. Leerhsen sacrifices weight for speed ... This book doesn’t merely light candles but scuffs him up. I doubt it will be the final word.
Leerhsen chooses to view Bourdain chiefly through the lens of his suicide. Throughout the book, different aspects of Bourdain’s life and personality are cast as foreshadowing his end ... By ending on the texts, Leerhsen gives in to salaciousness, undermining what is otherwise a stylized and exhaustively researched celebrity biography. A former editor at Sports Illustrated, Leerhsen has the magazine writer’s ability to put us inside the life of a famous person ... He also makes the interesting choice to focus on Bourdain’s early years, before we knew him. This is a gritty contrast to other recent Bourdain books and documentaries that lean heavily on the proud production-company and celebrity collaborators of his later years ... Whether you are a Bourdain fan or a relative newcomer to his story, you’ll come away with a better understanding of what made the man. Yet sometimes he comes across as a bit too intent on cutting Bourdain down to a more manageable life size ... Leerhsen gets how Bourdain’s vices and neuroses helped him forge a bond with his audience...But Leerhsen is less successful at taking the next step: conveying how—or why—this sort of guy, damaged in many ways, someone who had never really traveled much before hosting a television series, ended up showing us so much ... What’s missing in this new biography is the possibility that the dark backstory Leehrsen tells contributed not just to Bourdain’s suicide but to his unusual empathy: Having known the rock bottom of heroin and crack addiction, the dislocation of not fitting in or feeling comfortable, perhaps Bourdain was better equipped to really see people struggling against forces that were too big for them to control ... Leehrsen has an eye for the devastating detail.
A solidly researched and, despite its press, not especially lurid biography, Down and Out in Paradise has a stubborn resistance to psychologizing its subject that—along with the use of such antique terms as 'the boob tube' and 'red-blooded American male'—gives it a dated air. It reads as if it were written in 1999 ... Most who die by suicide suffer from clinical depression, but Leerhsen never investigates whether Bourdain had any history of this illness ... Leerhsen hazily tries to equate that doomed affair with Bourdain’s addiction to fame, and Instagram and gossip columns did play an outsize role in it. But it’s impossible to believe that what Bourdain really needed was to get back to the version of himself that spent all night out drinking with his pals, and that if he could only have stayed at this never-ending party, he might have survived. Portraying him this way seems a greater disservice to Leerhsen’s subject than the publication of any text message.
