Monotonous personal history coupled with interesting essays on world travel.
A Texas-based author shares her family history and travelogues.
Osborn (Where We Are Now: Short Stories, 2015, etc.) divides the book into two sections: “Durations, a Memoir” and “Essays.” In the first section, the author runs through her childhood memories and family history in comprehensive and often dry detail. We learn about the numerous times she moved as a child, which aunts and uncles took her and her brother in while their father was in the military during World War II, and the rapid disappearance of their mother into an institution for a condition that was rarely discussed. “Of all the secrets in our family,” she writes, “the greatest one was my mother’s condition.” Only as an adult was Osborn able to piece together a more complete picture of her mother’s schizophrenia, which required hospitalization. The author also discusses her struggles during grade school and high school, experiences that are common to most children with divorced or separated parents. Her new stepmother also features in this section, a woman who readily embraced her new stepchildren. Unfortunately, this first section consistently bogs down in slow-moving prose and the kinds of innocuous details that will appeal mainly to the author’s family and friends. Readers are advised to skip to the second section of the book, in which Osborn presents more refreshing tales of raising cattle on a dry patch of land in Texas, seeking out the blue-footed booby in the Galápagos Islands, and wandering the desolate landscape of the Scotland Highlands in search of family ties. In her travel essays, the author provides adequately colorful descriptions of the people and their surroundings, whether it's a security guard with an AK-47 in front of the pyramids in Egypt or her father hunting doves in Texas.
Monotonous personal history coupled with interesting essays on world travel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60940-544-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wings Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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