by Brigid Keenan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
Keenan understands how much the world has changed and hopes her story will resonate with reflective readers who will...
A memoir about “what it was like to grow up…in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s in a family that was, like Britain itself, facing and adapting to the enormous changes taking place around us with gathering speed.” Keenan (Packing Up: Further Adventures of a Trailing Spouse, 2014, etc.), who lived in India until she was 8, recounts her childhood in India followed by her career as a fashion reporter in London during the 1960s. The author’s gossipy, lighthearted narrative offers a peek into the lives of a certain slice of British society. As a member of the British military, the author’s father was posted to India. Born in 1939, Keenan was a member of the generation known as “the last of the British Raj babies.” Keenan interweaves her memories of her family life on a British army base with the rich cultural, social, and political life of India. In 1947, following Indian independence from the 200-year British rule and the division of India into two countries, the family returned to Britain. Returning home to a “grim postwar England after a Technicolor childhood in one of England’s colonies” as a teenager was a challenge. However, the author became one of the it girls of her day and was cited as “one of the two best young fashion writers of the day.” While many of the pop cultural references and personalities Keenan mentions may be unfamiliar to American readers, the author skillfully captures the zeitgeist of the youth rebellion in London during the 1960s. Her world did include a solid cast of well-known characters, including Nora Ephron, Jean Shrimpton, Terence Conran, Mary Quant, Diana Vreeland, and Vidal Sassoon.
Keenan understands how much the world has changed and hopes her story will resonate with reflective readers who will appreciate her brief but warm glance back in time.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4088-5227-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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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...
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
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