The founder of the Pushcart Press and editor of its Pushcart Prize series writes a coming-of-middle-age memoir that gets as intimate as a memoir ought to. Opening with the death of his mother, Henderson recalls life as her son and the son of a father besotted with fundamentalist religion. His reaction, of course, was a bohemian life as an unpublished literary artist intoxicated with words. For this wannabe beat author of the great American novel, life in New York as the '60s turned into the '70s appeared to be one of unbridled venery, with a plentitude of screwing, booze, screwing, drugs, screwing, laughs, and genial copulation. The beau monde is described in a set piece about a visit to a sex palace that is less erotic than plain raunchy (and not particularly helpful to those who still hope for federal funding for the arts). All the while Henderson was yearning for Miss Right. Along with a few near-Miss Rights, he finally met her, and though her name was Annie, she looked a lot like Ellen Burstyn. His blood pressure became elevated. He suffered palpitations. He shipped books from his garage, the early offices of his Pushcart Press, and endured uxorious mishaps as he finally settled down with Annie and a Chesapeake retriever (named Ellen Burstyn). And the reprobate began a reformation. To the couple's eventual delight, Annie became pregnant, and after much prepartum bleeding, graphically reported, she gave birth to a daughter. Henderson rejoices in the evergreen miracle. Now his daughter is 11, and he has returned to a fervent religion of the buttonholing variety. He ends his story with the astonishment, common to every daddy, at the beauty and bravery, the wit and wisdom of his child, his wonderful child. Just this side of bathos, this is a heartfelt and affecting story of a scapegrace who achieved grace through the oldest of marvels, parenthood.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-571-19872-4
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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