An uneven biography that should still find an audience with budding journalists and those interested in a significant period...
An account of the adventurous life of Alicia Patterson (1906-1963), founder and editor of Newsday.
Before screenwriter Alice Arlen died earlier this year, she teamed with her husband, former New Yorker staff writer and TV critic Michael Arlen (Say Goodbye to Sam, 1984, etc.), to document the life and premature passing of Patterson, Alice’s aunt. Descended from a wealthy, powerful Chicago newspaper family, Patterson could have lived as an idle heiress or a philanthropist or some other choice open only to the very rich. Until age 34, she seemed rather aimless, marrying twice unhappily to men chosen by her imperious father. Eventually, she became an accomplished horsewoman and learned about flying airplanes. Twice divorced, Patterson chose her third husband on her own. Harry Guggenheim had benefitted from a family fortune in the mining business and owned estates on Long Island. Although he attempted to control Alicia, she resisted, and together they purchased a tiny Long Island newspaper. She won editorial if not financial control and slowly built Newsday into a successful general circulation daily. Feeling ignored by her husband and clashing with him about politics (she was more liberal than her generally conservative husband), Patterson developed a deep friendship with Adlai Stevenson, who became the governor of Illinois and then sought the presidency as the Democratic Party candidate in 1952 and 1956. Stevenson fell deeply in love with Patterson, and she loved Stevenson as well, albeit with less ardor. Their off-again, on-again affair defined a large portion of their later lives. Unable to bear children, Patterson's health began to deteriorate during her two final decades. She hoped to outlive Guggenheim and take total control of Newsday, but she died before he did. The authors display impressive research, but the narrative is marred by an unpleasant writing style, at turns cloying, rhetorical, and packed with too many unnecessary compound-complex sentences.
An uneven biography that should still find an audience with budding journalists and those interested in a significant period in the history of print journalism.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87113-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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