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TOLKIEN

Name: TOLKIEN
Author: Catherine McIlwaine
ISBN: 978-1-85124-485-0

MAKER OF MIDDLE-EARTH

edited by Catherine McIlwaine ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2018

Richly illustrated and dense with information: Tolkien fans could have no better companion.

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A gathering of materials—drafts, illustrations, photographs, and the like—related to the great British author, the creator, as the subtitle says, of an entire imaginary world.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1882-1973), the inventor not just of Middle Earth, but also of modern fantasy literature, was a man of parts: scholar, student of European literatures and languages, teacher, invalided soldier, and family man. The centerpiece of his activities for decades was the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where he taught for decades. Bodleian Tolkien archivist McIlwaine returns the favor by assembling a trove of Tolkien-iana from the library’s holdings, from historic and family photographs to decided literary treasures such as Tolkien’s first, much-amended map of The Shire, the location of the Woody End moved about from place to place until settling near the Brandywine Bridge. In the author’s learned extended captions, many moments of discovery await, as when we find Tolkien writing to W.H. Auden about an early lesson in grammar imparted after his mother read a story of his: “My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon,’ but had to say ‘a great green dragon.’ I wondered why, and still do.” Dragons figure prominently, here, of course, as well as all the other characters from Tolkien’s cycle of modern legends, including Gollum, whom Tolkien subtly revised in The Hobbit after giving him an evil backstory in the succeeding Lord of the Rings trilogy. McIlwaine’s assemblage provides fascinating hints into the development of Tolkien and his work. A pre–World War I painting of his, for example, prefigures the dark, spidery woods that Bilbo and company would enter 20 years later, while his studies of Old Norse literature would inform his story cycle and the languages its figures spoke.

Richly illustrated and dense with information: Tolkien fans could have no better companion.

Pub Date: July 15, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-85124-485-0

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Bodleian Library

Review Posted Online: July 24, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)