Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940), clever, sociable, and film-star handsome, published 65 books—including novels, memoirs, histories, and texts on Ping-Pong and ice-skating—and innumerable ghost stories, essays, reviews, and plays, his effortless production attracting both enough admirers to form the E.F. Benson Society with its newsletter, Dodo, and such talented biographers as Masters—whose 17 books—including lives of Rabelais, Camus, Moliäre, and one mass murderer—help him understand this prolific writer. However affable and charming on the surface, Benson apparently was as secretive, compulsive, egocentric, and sexually dysfunctional as his siblings. They included a sister who killed herself in an insane rage; a Roman Catholic monsignor who fantasized being beaten by Italian police and feared being buried alive; and another brother who was besieged by demons of melancholia and guilt—all of them writing obsessively about themselves, repulsed by human touch, idealizing the kind of hypothetically chaste homosexual relationships their mother preferred after the death of their broodingly depressive father, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Intellectually a trivialist, Benson studied Greek archaeology, mastered figure-skating, visited Capri with various young men, and ended up as the mayor of Rye. His major inventions: David Blaise, a faintly disguised account of his own schoolboy romances; Dodo, whose ``artful prattle'' influenced the expression of youthful society in 1893; the silly and sentimental Lucia and the ``malevolently curious'' Miss Mapp, both the subjects of a series of novels; and an evocation of Edwardian society in As We Were. With respect and sympathy, Masters explores the mania behind Benson's prolific writing—the conflicting motives to express himself and to deflect attention from his own anguish; his drive to control ``the overloaded circuits of his brain,'' writing for therapy, for concealment, for compensation, and producing, ironically, a terrible sense of futility and of unfulfillment. Masters creates a haunting and poignant story of misconstrued literary success, his pace, light touch, and elegant style evocative of Benson himself.
Pub Date: March 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-7011-3566-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Chatto & Windus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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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