A short biographical corrective regarding the Jewish- American folk hero, and some previously unpublished correspondence, both disappointingly slight. In the first third of this volume, Ohio-based critic Young attempts to revise the myth of Emma Lazarus (18491887), who penned ``The New Colossus'' in celebration of the Statue of Liberty. The author claims that Lazarus was not introverted and somber, as her sister Josephine described her soon after her death, but in fact a vibrant and social woman. Young successfully discredits some of Lazarus's previous biographers, including the one who in 1938 wrote that while passing the Statue of Liberty during her final illness Lazarus was ``too weak'' to notice the plaque on which her poem was inscribed—the plaque was not placed there until 1903, 16 years after the poet's death. The author is also convincing when she portrays Lazarus as a conflicted personality: a defender of the Jews who derided European Jewry; a 19th-century woman who insisted, ``I am not & improbable as it sounds, I don't want to be [engaged].'' The text, however, does not satisfactorily address these conflicts, and Young's interpretations of Lazarus's work are plodding. Lazarus's letters, which comprise the bulk of the book, are more interesting, though they too raise more questions than they answer. Correspondents include Helena deKay Gilder, wife of Century editor Richard Watson Gilder; Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop; E.R.A. Seligman, son of the prominent Jewish banker Joseph Seligman; and Henry James. Unfortunately, all the correspondence is one-sided (from Lazarus to her friends, except in the case of James), which makes it difficult to gauge the relationships in full. Instructive, but by no means the final word on the subject.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8276-0516-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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