A father's close-up view of his daughter's growing up, from her active days in the womb to the exhausted tantrum at the end of her third birthday. Hall is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction (The Impossible Country, 1994), but it is the novelist's sensibility that he brings to this biography of his first child, Madeleine. He has done his research on mental and physical development of the infant to the age we now call preschooler: the prehensile grasp of newborns, so strong in the first days; the separation of ``me'' from ``not-me''; the understanding of object permanence; the development of mobility, self-awareness, language; issues of control (the two-year-old's ``No!''). But to his close observations of her development (he was the parent on duty exactly ``40 percent'' of the time), he brought also a familiarity with myth and the growth of consciousness, and a poetic sensibility that realizes things are not always what they seem. A simple example: Blowing out her second birthday candles disconcerted Madeleine. Normal interpretation: Where did the flame go? What magic is this? But Hall probes deeper. Interpreting a photograph from that event, he sees Madeleine as looking ``worried and guilty''; had she ``broken'' or ``killed'' the flames? Is she beginning to understand herself as an instrument, a cause of the effect? When she begins to fear the monsters in the shadows, Hall reads and rereads the books meant to reassure her but finally comes to grips with Madeleine's very real dread and assigns himself to protect her: ``If a tiger came in here, I'd give it a karate chop.'' ``Poop'' is also a big issue, as is Madeleine's ambivalence at the arrival of her baby sister. Like every first-time parent, Hall seems to project his own childhood doubts and fears onto his daughter. Nevertheless, it's a pleasure to have a father report so astutely and with such concern on a baby growing up.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-87059-3
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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