When Butler maintains his focus on Cuba, vivid passages and provocative experiences illuminate an island of ambiguity.
Though categorized as a memoir, the most compelling parts of this disjointed narrative concern the Cuba that the author has explored trying to come to terms with a story.
Butler (A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro's Traitor to American Champion, 2014) delivers colorful writing and insightful analysis, but a slight shift in perspective would have resulted in a better book about the author’s subject: Cuba and why some athletes choose to defect and others remain. Plainly an author with literary ambitions beyond journalism, Butler writes of the essence of boxing and his discovery of it, of his alcoholic father, and of the sense of mission that compelled him to visit Cuba, return multiple times, and put himself in political peril there. He is oddly reticent for a memoirist on other parts of his life, including his marriage, mentioned only as an afterthought as he details his relationship with a beautiful woman of Cuban descent. Butler invokes many literary antecedents, not only the obligatory Hemingway, but also Kundera, Calvino, and Strindberg. Rather than enhancing his portrait of Cuba, its ineffable beauty and sorrow, its athletes who face a dilemma in which there is collateral damage to friends and family, its women who are as available as they are irresistible, his excursions away from his focus on the island only serve to distract. “What’s a million dollars to the love of eight million Cubans?” the author quotes Olympic boxing champ Teófilo Stevenson, the Muhammad Ali of Cuba, who spurned more than that to fight his American counterpart (but who only consented to an interview with the author for money). Yet for the woman who would become his mistress, “Cuba was a bear trap where the only means of escape required amputating vital portions of her soul.” The book is by no means a political polemic but a nuanced portrait of the grays where reality lies between the black and white.
When Butler maintains his focus on Cuba, vivid passages and provocative experiences illuminate an island of ambiguity.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04370-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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