CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?

Name: CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?
Author: Ashleigh Young
ISBN: 978-0-525-53403-7

by Ashleigh Young ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2018

Young has said that her essays emerge from feelings of awkwardness about herself and her place in the world, but with this...

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A debut collection of essays from Young (Creative Writing/Victoria Univ. of Wellington; Magnificent Moon, 2013), a poet and editor with Victoria University Press in New Zealand.

The author has a clean, generally engaging writing style, though she has a tendency to meander. Important passages sometimes lack context, and several pieces would benefit from more background and fleshing out. Young’s defining strengths are honesty, sharp observational skills, and sensitivity shorn of sentimentality. Most of these essays originally appeared in various New Zealand literary magazines and journals, and there are cultural references and colloquialisms that may puzzle some readers. Nor are all the entries essays in the strictest sense. Many read like short stories or rather eccentric reminiscences, especially “Big Red,” a long account of a not-terribly-interesting family. The collection’s better pieces—“Katherine Would Approve,” “Sea of Trees,” and “Wolf Man”—reflect on such concerns as memory, impermanence, self-consciousness, the nature of solitude, and the author’s acute body awareness. Young is undeniably thoughtful, and she displays flair. She can arrest you with a glorious passage, a searching perception, or exquisitely apt metaphors and similes. But even some of her finer essays risk undercutting their potency with random endings, not so much open-ended as abrupt or flat. At the same time, the author reveals wisdom beyond her years and is a highly sympathetic figure. Young's verse has been praised for its “restrained exuberance,” though such buoyancy is seldom on display here. The writing is measured and marked more by wistfulness and melancholy, though her curiosity and imagination are always engaged. Given the author's talent and depth of vision, readers can expect continued improvement in her nonfiction work.

Young has said that her essays emerge from feelings of awkwardness about herself and her place in the world, but with this collection and those to follow, the world of this promising New Zealander is about to become wider.

Pub Date: July 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-53403-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

Categories:

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)