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THE LAST GOOD FREUDIAN

Name: THE LAST GOOD FREUDIAN
Author: Brenda Webster
ISBN: 0-8419-1395-1

by Brenda Webster ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000

A fresh take on the poorlittlerichgirl theme, whinefree and surprisingly frank. (16 b&w photos)

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Soulbearing memoirs of a woman ``born and brought up to be in psychoanalysis,'' who discovers rather late in life that writing fiction has taught her more about herself than years of psychotherapy.

Webster (Sins of the Mother, 1993; Paradise Farm, 1999) was born in New York in the 1930s into a family of wealthy nonobservant Jews—her mother an abstract painter and disciple of Ashile Gorky and her father an entertainment lawyer—and grew up in a segment of New York society immersed in the culture of psychiatry. ``It became, in effect, our family faith,'' she writes, noting that her anxious, temperamental mother was in therapy with a Freudian analyst five days a week for 30 years. At 14, Webster had her own therapist. Her portrait of her eccentric mother is compelling, as is her description of her own therapyridden adolescence. Encouraged by her first analyst to express her sexuality, she became pregnant while at Swarthmore, but her mother, seemingly nonplused, swiftly arranged for an abortion. Shortly thereafter, Webster moved back home and acquired a new therapist, the famous Kurt Eissler (founder of the Freud Archives). His views were, in Webster's words, ``archaic, patriarchal, and above all unrealistic.'' When she entered graduate school at Berkeley, another Freudian, Anna Maenchen, took over. Although Maenchen was apparently indifferent to Webster's unhappiness in her subsequent marriage, the author, by now emotionally dependent on her therapist, repeatedly turned to her over the years for help. Eventually Webster, whose writing had until then been psychoanalyses of literary texts, divorced her husband, found a new love, and took up a new line of work—writing fiction. Now, seemingly at peace with herself and bearing no resentment toward the quixotic, sometimes suicidal, very unmotherly mother whose faith in Freudian psychiatry shaped both their lives, she concludes, ``The great thing about being human is that you can recreate yourself, not by analyzing but by active imagining. A difficult family isn't fate.''

A fresh take on the poorlittlerichgirl theme, whinefree and surprisingly frank. (16 b&w photos)

Pub Date: April 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8419-1395-1

Page Count: 208

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PARADISE FARM
by Brenda Webster

- BOOK REVIEW
SINS OF THE MOTHERS
by Brenda Webster

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)