by Arthur Hoyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2014
Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre.
A refreshing biography of Henry Miller (1891–1980) that plunges into his work and spares readers some tedious early detail.
California-based educator and documentary filmmaker Hoyle catches up with Miller in 1939, when he was wrapping up his years of bohemian living in Paris, facing the prospect of German invasion and coming war. The social and moral collapses he witnessed about him are vividly captured in the work he produced during the 1930s, published by Jack Kahane through his Obelisk Press in Paris. These included Miller’s signature works celebrating the “artist of life,” such as Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, which gave him notoriety in Europe but was banned in England and the United States for alleged obscenity until the early 1960s. Indeed, at this juncture, Miller was frustrated by the inability to publish his work in America. As impecunious as when he arrived in Paris, he was fatalistic about his future writing career: “I lack the courage for further hardships.” Moreover, his important love and benefactress, Anaïs Nin, was not going to leave her husband and make an idyllic life with Miller, and his interludes in Corfu and to New York meant an imminent break with her. Hoyle quotes extensively from Miller’s prodigious correspondence. Dismayed by the ugly acquisitiveness of New York, Miller nonetheless reconnected with his troubled family in Brooklyn, writing about this period as the reconciliation of the prodigal son. Moving to California, and being offered, in 1944, a cheap cabin to use in Big Sur, a region of startling natural beauty, radically altered Miller’s sense of his American identity and destiny as a writer. Here he would embark on his deeply autobiographical account of his upbringing, The Rosy Crucifixion, and forge important new relationships that would nourish his work and solidify his literary legacy as more than a “lowly pornographer.”
Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61145-899-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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
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