As Fahs portrays her, Solanas emerges less as “a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish” than as a woman...
A sympathetic biography of a troubled and troubling woman.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) shot Andy Warhol, almost fatally wounding him. That act and her writing of a feminist manifesto titled SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) made her a cult heroine in her own time. Fahs (Gender Studies/Arizona State Univ.; Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives, 2011, etc.), believing Solanas to be a brilliant and “startling prescient,” faced considerable challenges in working on this biography: Solanas’ mother burned her daughter’s papers after Valerie died, and many who knew her refused to talk with Fahs. “Valerie famously rejected, alienated, and repeatedly threatened to kill nearly every friend she had,” writes the author. A polarizing figure, Solanas was championed by such feminists as Ti-Grace Atkinson and Florynce Kennedy, the lawyer who defended her for attempted murder, but was reviled by others. The National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, was divided about associating itself with her. A radical faction interpreted Solanas’ act as revolutionary, “a symbol of women’s rage.” Liberal feminists, focused on abortion rights reform, saw the enraged, violent Solanas as “NOW’s worst nightmare.” For her part, Solanas vehemently rejected expressions of solidarity. “SCUM is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs,” she wrote to Atkinson, who had praised the manifesto. “Therefore, please refrain from commenting on SCUM + from ‘defending’ me. I already have an excess of ‘friends’ out there who are suffocating me.” Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic after the shooting, Solanas descended ever more deeply into madness, spending her last 20 years in and out of mental hospitals. She claimed that a transmitter had been planted in her uterus and that an entity she called "the Mob" was after her. She died impoverished and alone.
As Fahs portrays her, Solanas emerges less as “a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish” than as a woman destroyed by her own overpowering demons.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55861-848-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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