Frank memoirs of an adolescence shaped by a bout with polio that changed forever the author’s body and psyche. This slice of very personal history comes from a man better known for his plays and his diplomatic and political writings (The End of Order: Versailles 1919, 1980, etc.). Mee was stricken with spinal polio in the summer of 1953, when he was 14 years old. From a healthy, athletic 160-pounder, he was rapidly transformed into a weak 90-pounder able to move only three fingers of one hand. Threaded through his recollections of his hospitalization and rehabilitation is a brief history of the disease, including a vivid portrait of the culture of fear it engendered, the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the March of Dimes, Sister Kenny’s excruciating therapeutic techniques, and the search for vaccines by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Even more fascinating are his accounts of the useless medical and surgical treatments performed by doctors anxious to do something, anything, for their young patients. The heart of Mee’s story, however, is his confrontation with the reality of what happened to him. Deeply ingrained with the ideal of the normal—he gives a wonderful picture of middle-American normality of the 1950s complete with paint-by-numbers art, Father Knows Best, and stay-at-home moms raising football-playing sons and cheerleader daughters—Mee could not deny his own deviance from that normality as he struggled to pass for a normal teenager. Fortunately, the world of books and the mind opened to him, and he pays tribute to those who helped him find his way there. Mee ends these memoirs with his leaving home for Harvard, but an epilogue provides a glimpse of the nearly normal life he created for himself in the years that followed. A reminder of a past era of conformity and a clear depiction of what it means to be an outsider.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-55852-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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