The first biography of one of American poetry's finest lyricists—whose literary grace and authority, musical sense, and headlong (often foolish) way with life bears remarkable resemblance to the much differently circumstanced Boris Pasternak's. Gooch (Scary Kisses, 1988) follows O'Hara from his Massachusetts Catholic boyhood (son of an alcoholic mother who'd be a cafard to O'Hara all his life) to Harvard (where he was part of the remarkable postwar literary generation that included Creeley, Brodkey, Donald Hall, Ashbery, Koch, Edward Gorey, and more) and then to New York. There, O'Hara not only was (with Ashbery and Koch) the coagulator of the New York School style of poetry, but his art criticism became seminal to the first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors of the 50's, a position that elided with ever higher curatorial positions he held at the MOMA until his tragic death at 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island in the dead of night. O'Hara's friendships—homo- and heterosexual—were the very weft of his life: Around him much of the best of midcentury New York art revolved, played, feuded, splintered. Gooch misses none of these social complications, but no scale seems to have weighed the testimonies relatively, and this gives the book a passive and flattened feel: Interviewees come off as talking-head opinion- spouters, all—and none—equally to the point. The paucity of literary appreciation here, of critical eye, is the real disappointment. O'Hara's remarkable poetry is quoted, dated, summarized—but never quite appreciated for its unusual achievements. Literary queen bee—that's what O'Hara comes off as here (which, granted, at his worst he sometimes took himself to be only as well), not the prince of poetry he would more enduringly become. (Fifty-five photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: June 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-57118-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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