A brimming life told with a refined touch. (24 b&w and 8 color photos)
Granddaughter Sandys (Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive, 2000, etc.) follows in Winston’s footsteps, giving impressions of his travels and those he met.
Churchill was chock-a-block with restless energy, notes Sandys, who herself writes with comfortable ease; baldness notwithstanding, he lived as though his hair were on fire. Whether serving as a soldier, journalist, statesman, painter, low-level colonial administrator, or a purveyor of major historical moments on the international stage, he viewed his life as one long working holiday. Change was regenerative for Churchill, as were scenes of adventure and excitement, though the author notes that he sought by his own admission “places where I could gain experience and derive advantage.” This attitude gained him position after increasingly influential position within the British government; it also meant that Churchill witnessed and/or participated in some memorable historical moments, from the last cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 to the first summer Maria Callas spent on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in 1959. Sandys succeeds in giving Churchill’s travels the full treatment: not just the where and when, but how he reacted to the events at hand (often guided by his “paternalistic Victorian” nature), the style in which he traveled (let it be said that he liked his comforts), the pleasures he found in the landscape (the sunsets over Marrakech made it “the most lovely spot in the world”), his yearning to be at the sharp edge of things. The author does not attempt to make value judgments about Churchill's policies, but she does reasonably find that his effectiveness as a politician required him “personally to influence people and make things happen.” His willingness to go almost anywhere endeared him to people who would otherwise have detested his politics; the Cubans, Sandys found, continue to esteem him “as a very great man who was and still is the best advertisement for their national product.”
A brimming life told with a refined touch. (24 b&w and 8 color photos)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1214-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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