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BEAUTY BEFORE COMFORT

Name: BEAUTY BEFORE COMFORT
Author: Allison Glock
ISBN: 0-375-40121-0

A MEMOIR

by Allison Glock ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2003

A memoir as elemental as its subject: pulsing, fetching, leaving a strong afterglow. (20 photos)

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Glock debuts with a lovely, blue memoir of her maternal grandmother, a vital square peg in the poor, round hole of a hard-baked West Virginia town.

Writing with the rhythmically punctuated cadence of one semi-lost in thought as she conjures images, the author tells the story of both Aneita Jean Blair and the town of Chester, West Virginia, during the first half of the 20th century. Despite its green hills, wildflowers, and pockets of loveliness, its clean clay that drove the pottery mills, Chester had its full share of sordidness, squabbles, potter's lung, lead poisoning, backstabbing, and the grind of just making do. In this working-poor company town, Blair knew she was made of choicer stuff. She was a sparkplug who “spent at least seventy of her eighty-two years cultivating stares and making damn sure she has warranted the attention.” Dancing mattered, beauty inspired (“a woman who didn't bother to make the most of what God gave her was displaying a lack of fortitude”), baking a cake was important, but so was telling a joke and knowing how to smoke a cigarette in a bus-stop ladies’ room: style made this woman. It’s not much of a surprise that “puberty hit my grandmother like a dropped piano,” or that at 13 she attracted men like iron filings to a magnet. Her stern Scotch father was apoplectic, her mother was gentle, her brother Petey was her rock. “While her girlfriends were frantically honing in on potential mates, Aneita Jean spun the revolving door off its hinges”; again, it’s no surprise when the author warns, “sooner or later, everyone is in for a world of hurt.” Petey died young, Blair married a man who would never leave town, and her beauty paled: “it made her nastier, and it made her funnier,” qualities that drew her granddaughter to her with the same ardor as those men so many years before.

A memoir as elemental as its subject: pulsing, fetching, leaving a strong afterglow. (20 photos)

Pub Date: May 6, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-40121-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)