A well-told story. (Illustrations)
A biography of a significant figure of the Gilded Age who is now generally ignored by historians of popular culture.
In 1853, young Heinrich Hilgard borrowed the surname of an acquaintance and left Bavaria with more hubris than prospects. He arrived in America as Henry Villard, possessing not a dollar and not a word of English. Promptly acquiring proficiency in the language, he practiced the emerging profession of political reporter, traveling with candidate Stephen A. Douglas in his campaign against Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, the new journalist became a pioneering war correspondent, and much of the book details Villard’s witness of battles from First Manassas to the Crater. After Appomattox, the young man went West (where he met a discomfited Horace Greeley) to report on the Pikes Peak gold rush. The evident need for western transportation brought Villard to the railroad business, thence to Wall Street. Eventually, he ran a newspaper, controlled the Northern Pacific Railroad, and helped Thomas Edison found General Electric. He was proud, frequently disdainful, and prejudiced. As his fortunes waxed and waned, he battled the most malevolent robber barons, yet his reputation remained relatively intact (muckraker Gustavus Meyers called him “a man of remarkable character and enterprise”). He knew the eminent personages of his time: Lincoln and Edison, Jay Gould and James Gordon Bennett, a squad of Union generals and William Lloyd Garrison (who became his esteemed father-in-law). Villard’s is a prototypical American story, worthy of Horatio Alger. Yet, if he is remembered at all today, it’s likely to be by New Yorkers who know the Madison Avenue palazzo he inhabited for just a few months, now straddled by the Helmsley Palace Hotel. De Borchgrave and her collaborator, a translator of German and Italian texts, rely heavily on their subject's memoirs, not always the most reliable of sources. In this case the resultant biography is quite credible and eminently creditable.
A well-told story. (Illustrations)Pub Date: March 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-48662-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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