by Bliss Broyard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2007
The expansive narrative is in need of pruning. Still, this uniquely American story of race and ambition is of surpassing...
The daughter of former New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard (1920–90) relentlessly pursues the story of his mixed racial heritage, which he had concealed.
Bliss Broyard began her own career with a collection of short stories, My Father Dancing (1999), published nine years after her mother finally revealed that Anatole came from a New Orleans family of blacks and Creoles. Bliss and her brother were, to say the least, surprised. They had grown up in suburban Connecticut, spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard and attended exclusive, mostly white schools. Although the kids had met their grandmother and an aunt when they were small, their father never mentioned his large extended family in the Big Easy. After he died, his daughter determined to get it all and to get it right, embarking on years of prodigious research involving multiple trips to New Orleans; searches for birth certificates, former homes, places of business; numerous interviews with family, friends, lovers, employers. The result is a complicated and sometimes distracting tapestry that weaves together the Broyard family tree, her father’s biography and her mother’s much briefer backstory with her own childhood, adolescence and young womanhood. Adding to the narrative ungainliness are large—sometimes too large—doses of social history: of New Orleans, of race in America, even of DNA testing. Despite occasional silliness, as when the author mentions that some people had always said she danced like a black girl, the tone here is generally serious. A not-so-admirable Anatole Broyard emerges. Though his daughter endeavors to understand him, less forgiving readers will be repulsed by his cold rejection of his birth family, his serial sexual escapades before and during his marriages, his ferocious, vaulting ambition, his personal and professional arrogance, his paternal pettiness. These are not qualities that Bliss Broyard wishes to highlight, but she does not downplay them either.
The expansive narrative is in need of pruning. Still, this uniquely American story of race and ambition is of surpassing importance.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-16350-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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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