by Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2018
Minutaglio and Davis are superb storytellers, and throughout the narrative, they nimbly move between their two converging...
A riveting international chase between a tenacious but paranoid cat and a wily but delusional mouse.
Minutaglio (In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas, 2010, etc.) and Davis (Curator, Wittliff Collections/Texas State Univ.), who collaborated previously on Dallas 1963 (2014), deliver a rich and frequently hilarious chronicle of the Nixon administration’s 28-month pursuit of one very slippery old hippie. The comedy of errors began when Timothy Leary, ex–Harvard professor and America’s leading advocate of LSD, received a stiff jail term in California for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Broke but extremely well-connected on the outside, he staged a daring escape. Almost immediately, he became the top quarry for the new president, who was fending off daily protests from student demonstrators over Vietnam and was bent on showing the world just how tough he was on drugs, crime, and corrupters of youth. Leary quickly proved to be an elusive target; with help from the Weather Underground, he and his wife, Rosemary, holed up in Algeria under the wary protection of Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Panthers. Leary found himself having to forge a new persona—“a marriage of dope and dynamite, flower and flames,” as one associate put it—and it was not a comfortable fit. The free-living, free-loving Leary had a most turbulent asylum amid gun-toting revolutionaries who were all about killing the fascist pigs. Soon enough, Leary was dodging Nixon and his cronies all over the world. Ultimately, it’s a story whose twists would involve a wealthy playgirl, a shadowy financier, and government officials who were torn between aiding the Hanoi-bombing hunter or his acid-gulping prey.
Minutaglio and Davis are superb storytellers, and throughout the narrative, they nimbly move between their two converging subjects. Their account is expertly detailed and blessedly fat-free.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-6358-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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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...
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
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