Like the quilt her character Celie makes in the bestselling novel The Color Purple, Walker has created a patchwork verbal memento of the filming of her novel that will delight fans and movie buffs but is too self-absorbed to be of general interest. Hesitating both to record a personally painful time in her life and to try to answer those critics—especially blacks—who accused her of hating black men, Walker explains that she was finally able to write this book by freeing herself of the past, by "growing a new skin." And as she began assembling journal entries, letters from fans and critics, media commentary, and her own script—published here for the first time—she noticed how the experience of those years had changed her own understanding: "You really cannot step into the same river twice." She now understood why Steven Spielberg, the director, as a creative person, had not always been true to the book: For instance, in the movie, Celie was no longer a writer. Involved in the actual making of the movie, Walker fervently praises the stars, the script writer, and Spielberg, but what hurt her was black reaction to the film. She includes both positive and negative critiques as well as letters from admirers and opponents to indicate the range of emotions it provoked. Though the movie was nominated for but won no awards, Walker feels that the strengths The Color Purple celebrates will endure. Walker details here not only how the movie came to be made, but her own sufferings in that period: a debilitating bout of Lyme disease; the prolonged death of her mother; and the end of a long relationship. These travails she now sees as a series of "spiritual tests" that she needed to overcome before moving forward. More scrapbook than a solid volume, as the usual Walker themes appear only intermittently between clippings and movie memorabilia.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81419-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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