An enthusiastic account: Gifford clearly relishes the chance to retrace his idol’s steps.
The travails of an elusive 18th-century traveler, brought to life by a biographer who goes to great lengths to get under his subject’s skin.
Little is known about John Ledyard (1751–89). Indeed, first-time author Gifford tells us, we don’t even know for sure what Ledyard looked like; the portrait on the book’s cover, like all other surviving images of Ledyard, was painted long after his death. Fortunately, plenty of written documentation remains, much of it written in Ledyard’s own hand, and Gifford liberally sprinkles his own text with quotations from his subject. The Connecticut-born Ledyard attended Dartmouth College for a while and in 1776 sailed into history with Captain James Cook (they embarked on a four-year expedition during which they “discovered” Hawaii). Gifford neatly divides his work between a retelling of that historic journey and reminiscences of his own weeklong, $200-a-day stint aboard a replica of Cook’s ship. Ledyard’s journal of the Cook expedition provides plenty of insight, although Gifford points out that it was written three years after the fact and contains many dates and names that don’t match those in other historical accounts. The author also offers evidence that some of Ledyard’s personal papers have been tampered with: He discovered one letter with a passage about a meeting with a married prostitute that had been crossed out, possibly by an overly protective relative; the passage does not appear in the three-volume transcript of Ledyard documents in Dartmouth College Library. Continuing to shadow the explorer’s movements (a journey to Siberia is particularly enthralling), Gifford concludes with an account of Ledyard’s death, which occurred just before he was about to undertake another gallant trek, this time through Africa. Fittingly, his corpse was never discovered.
An enthusiastic account: Gifford clearly relishes the chance to retrace his idol’s steps.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101218-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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