An imperfect grab-bag of ruminations that reflect a likable nerdy enthusiasm.
A freewheeling assortment of essays that bring surprising weight to ephemera like Dungeon & Dragons, Doritos and household repair.
Monson (Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, 2007, etc.) loosely conceives the book as a commentary on memoir and how the act of storytelling permits writers to carefully structure their identities. The author deploys a number of metatextual flourishes to get that idea across. He places passages from dozens of memoirs together to undercut their claims of unique emotional experience, runs the text of one essay without margins to show how strictly framed many stories are and opens an essay on solipsism by filling two pages with the word “me.” Moreover, certain keywords are flagged as subjects for further discussion on his website, otherelectricities.com, implying that any statements made between the covers is unstable. Monson earns the right to much of his gamesmanship, bringing a sharp humor and intellectual rigor to his essays. In “Voir Dire,” a piece about his experience as a jury foreman, he performs a close study of how trials are similar to stories, and how we apply our own experiences to others’ in the courtroom. “Transubstantiation” opens with an appreciation of snack chips; instead of slipping into the self-obsession he dreads, the author provides genuine insight into the distinction between real and fake, both in Doritos and in personalities. Not all of Monson’s pieces reflect such ingenuity. The text is littered with paragraph-long scraps of analysis of memoirs that seem ripe for either expansion or removal. Though the essay on bad pop songs sung by collegiate a cappella groups is good for a good laughs, Monson fails to spin the piece into a larger statement. Role-playing games are right in his wheelhouse, though, and he successfully uses the 2008 death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax to consider the nature of obsession with creating “other” selves, and how easily we snap into those roles.
An imperfect grab-bag of ruminations that reflect a likable nerdy enthusiasm.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55597-554-8
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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