For Alda devotees and fans of Robert Fulghum.
Avuncular life lessons from 70-something actor and bestselling author Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned, 2005).
Nothing requires a person to summarize the essence of a meaningful life like being asked to write a commencement address, and Alda has given plenty over the years. Here, he recalls—and includes generous excerpts of—those commencement addresses, as well as eulogies and other speeches. Each chapter ends with some sort of moral or bit of wisdom about living the good life: You should love, rather than badger, your kids. Young folks today ought not fantasize about the countercultural ’60s, but should focus on being honest, because leading a life of decency is itself revolutionary. Whatever your profession, remember the “real lives at the other end of your ministrations.” Even for the rich and famous, the really important stuff is small: searching for sea glass with children, reminding your buddies not to take themselves too seriously. Alda is at his best when describing the transcendent joy of acting. A few weeks after 9/11, he joined hundreds of Broadway actors to film a television ad, singing “New York, New York” and declaring that the city was back in business. Compared to the work at Ground Zero, filming this ad seemed trivial—yet, he writes, “this is what we do, and doing it with all the energy we could give it had lifted us up” and helped inject color into “this wounded, gray city.” Eventually, much of the advice becomes stale and bromidic, as when Alda tells his daughter to “be true to herself.” Alda’s final words of advice—and even he jokingly admits that it’s a “platitude”—are laugh a lot, let your life be an adventure and don’t make yourself crazy looking for Meaning.
For Alda devotees and fans of Robert Fulghum.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6617-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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