Sporadically engaging biography of Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916), the once-celebrated journalist who, among other accomplishments, reported on nearly every international conflict from the 1897 Cuban Revolution to WW I, posed for the male counterpart of the Gibson girl, and introduced the avocado to American dining tables. The eldest child of a newspaperman and a novelist remarkable only for the mawkishness of her literary romances and for her limpet-like attachment to her firstborn, Davis, explains Lubow, came to his writing career quite predictably. When barely out of his teens, the immensely gregarious Davis was already turning out society columns, special reports, and short stories for Charles Scribner and William Randolph Hearst. In addition, he counted Stanford White, Charles Dana Gibson, Ethel Barrymore, and Stephen Crane among his somewhat raffish circle of friends and associates. Interestingly, Davis himself, Lubow notes, was deeply priggish, a legacy of his repressively ``proper'' upbringing. He was also sexually unadventurous and didn't marry until his late 30s, when he formed an alliance with a much younger, ``liberated'' woman. Later divorced, he remarried and fathered a daughter. Harding evidently was a complex figure, but Lubow (a contributing editor to Vanity Fair) fails to plumb the societal implications of his life. A closer examination of the reasons for the championing by contemporary feminists of marriages—like Harding's first—in which spouses were more friends than lovers would have added depth to the portrait, for example. Lubow is more successful in comparing Davis's literary methods and objectives in his several successful novels to those of Stephen Crane. Both writers dealt with life among slum dwellers, Lubow points out; Crane, however, depicted his characters in starkly realistic terms, hoping to underline the need for reform, while Davis sketched his dramatis personae as lovable caricatures, thus reassuring his middle-class audience. Competently organized and smoothly written but lacking significant insights into a potentially intriguing protagonist. (Two eight-page photo inserts—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-684-19404-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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