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WILFRED THESIGER

Name: WILFRED THESIGER
Author: Alexander Maitland
ISBN: 978-1-59020-163-3

THE LIFE OF THE GREAT EXPLORER

by Alexander Maitland ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2011

For those nostalgic about for the glory days of the British empire, this biography should have a certain appeal.

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An eccentric explorer in the tradition of T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) lived with tribal warriors in Africa, traveled on camel through the Arabian desert and journeyed to the hitherto-unknown source of the Awash river in Ethiopia.

Maitland (A Tower in the Wall: Conversations with Dame Freya Stark, 1983, etc.) relies on Thesiger's extensive publications, many of which he helped edit, and he had access to personal correspondence as well as personal conversations over the 40 years of their friendship. Thesiger spent his early years in Ethiopia, where his father served in the British diplomatic service. While his childhood was a time of idyllic freedom, his education in England at the elite St. Aubyns and then Eton and Oxford was an unhappy period, in which he was beaten by sadistic headmasters for minor infractions and isolated by his peers. After graduation, he received an appointment in the Sudan Political Service, which gave him the opportunity to hunt big game and explore the wilderness areas as well as acquaint himself with tribal customs that included the murder and castration of enemies whose genitals were preserved as trophies. During World, War II, he served with British Special Forces and participated in the liberation of Ethiopia from the Italian occupation. As a big-game hunter, he was licensed to shoot two elephants per year and sought “the heaviest-tusked animals he could find.” He also claimed to have killed 1,000 wild boar in 1958. The author quotes Thesiger's experiences living with Arab nomads, as “times of excitement and hardship, accidents, pig hunts [and] blood feuds.” The explorer’s adventures are impressive, but some of his pejorative remarks about Africans became tiresome—at certain points in the narrative, he comes across as a Colonel Blimp type character.

For those nostalgic about for the glory days of the British empire, this biography should have a certain appeal.

Pub Date: July 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-59020-163-3

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)