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FATHER AND I

Name: FATHER AND I
Author: Carlo Gébler
ISBN: 0-7145-3064-6

A MEMOIR

by Carlo Gébler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2001

Often touching—sometimes harrowing—but overlong and overwrought. (13 b&w photographs)

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A British writer recalls his difficult relationship with a cold, sarcastic father—also a writer—who later vanishes into Alzheimer’s.

Novelist Gébler (How to Murder a Man, 1999, etc.) begins and ends with the insight he gained when his father died: “You can’t change the past but, with understanding, you can sometimes draw the poison out of it.” And here there’s much past, much poison, and, near the end, a few pages of understanding. Gébler starts in 1990 when he must find a custodial facility for his father, who has had a stroke and whose dementia is steadily deepening. He returns to his father’s house, gathers up his personal papers, boxes them, and stores them at home. It will be seven years before he examines them. Gébler then leaps backward to tell about his musician grandfather and his father’s career as a writer (he sold his novel The Plymouth Adventure to Hollywood; in 1952, the film opened with Spencer Tracy and Gene Tierney). Gébler remembers a lot from his early childhood (including pages of supposedly verbatim conversations), but none of it is very cheery. Three times we must read descriptions of his boyhood vomitus, and we hear a dreary litany of cruelties uttered by his father (who appears never to have struck his children): “ ‘Damned child,’ ” he muttered, ‘damn bloody child’ ” is typical. His parents eventually divorce, and Gébler and his brother, Sasha, elect to live with their mother, the writer Edna O’Brien. Gébler struggles through school, eventually fashioning for himself a career in writing and documentary filmmaking. He is disappointed when his father’s dementia does not permit the old man to appreciate how well his son has turned out. But he realizes that his father’s chronic depression caused him to behave as he did. And so Gébler can forgive him.

Often touching—sometimes harrowing—but overlong and overwrought. (13 b&w photographs)

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-7145-3064-6

Page Count: 410

Publisher: Marion Boyars

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW TO MURDER A MAN
by Carlo Gébler

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by Carlo Gébler

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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)