Engaging portrait of a journey of self-discovery, leading to the liberating knowledge that joy and freedom often come from...
NPR commentator Raskin’s laugh-out-loud memoir yields surprising insights about belatedly growing up in his mid-30s.
The San Francisco-based author earned an MBA from Wharton, mastered the trombone, become fluent in Japanese and built a successful career in business, but he had never been faithful to a girlfriend. He cheated on women he thought he loved and developed an addiction to online dating and one-night stands. After realizing that this behavior was related to his feelings of depression, he joined a recovery group. His sponsor asked him to abstain from dating for 90 days and to write letters detailing his past sins to someone he saw as a godlike figure. He settled on a longtime object of his fascination: 94-year-old billionaire noodle-maker Momofuku Ando. Writing things down led Raskin to the understanding that his sexual impulses were sparked by conflicts with men, usually co-workers or his father, and that he compensated for feelings of failure by having trysts. Layering his memoir with vignettes about sushi chefs, young-adult graphic novels, Japanese reality-TV shows, embarrassing moments in his Long Island childhood and conversations with many of the women he dated, the author chronicles his life in a creative and comprehensive manner. Ando’s story is an important element as well: Having read all of the noodle-maker’s autobiographies, Raskin threads details from them throughout the book, along with some of his famous sayings (“Peace follows from a full stomach,” etc.). After repeated unsuccessful attempts to set up an interview with Ando, the author embarked on a transatlantic pilgrimage to meet him with no appointment. Regardless of the outcome, he recognized that the point of such a choice—indeed, the point of any decision—was really the power of knowing exactly what he wanted.
Engaging portrait of a journey of self-discovery, leading to the liberating knowledge that joy and freedom often come from accepting limitations.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40444-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
