Dementedly original and unstoppable: Burroughs deserves a shelf all to himself, just as an unpredictable convict might...
Growing pains come first, then the adult pains, from the ever-odd, tragically farcical Burroughs.
“I learned that I had, in fact, been not merely kidnapped but stolen from the first family in American history,” the Vanderbilts, that is—in your dreams, Augusten. And readers will hope that many of these 27 stories are dreams, bad ones that Burroughs (Dry, 2003, etc.) cooked in his exorbitant imagination. But no, they are probably faithful renderings of his comically rendered anguish. They start with wicked swipes at his “so-called parents,” with their “Del Monte green bean breath,” and his tormenting brother: “a farm animal, a grunting primitive.” Was he not meant for something better than this, Burroughs pleads? Maybe, maybe not. He admits he was the kind of kid who “lived for television commercials” (though he is an abject failure at his one stage test); by fourth grade he “wanted to be Christine Jorgensen, the world’s first famous transsexual,” and had “decided that I would probably opt for the self-lubricating vagioplasty.” Then he gets older and stranger still. He considers poisoning his cleaning lady because she is as difficult and complicated as he is; he suffers remorse for killing a rodent that is trapped in his bathtub, then “I turned on the television and watched a little QVC. As I watched the host demonstrate the George Foreman Grill (which actually does seem easy to clean). . . .” Without missing a beat, he will note that “a handsome, hairy-chested Greek man is far better than mouth cancer,” that “I’m here to defend our Holy Fathers . . . Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life,” that “what little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan.” Honesty is Burroughs’s policy.
Dementedly original and unstoppable: Burroughs deserves a shelf all to himself, just as an unpredictable convict might require protective custody.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31594-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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