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UP UP, DOWN DOWN

ESSAYS

A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.

Tin House managing editor Knapp debuts with a collection of essays that attempt to balance highbrow and lowbrow elements.

In “Faces of Pain,” the author and a photographer attend a wrestling event held at the Portland Lion’s Club, where he “saw so many incredible things I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.” “Beirut” is an existential reflection on beer pong and the author’s frat-house 20s. “Mysteries We Live With” is an investigation into true-believer UFO subculture mixed with stories of the author’s own Christian upbringing. Most of the essays flow with self-deprecating charm, but Knapp often trips over his own wordiness and unnecessarily complicated verbiage. In the 90-page concluding essay, “Something’s Gotta Stick,” the author recounts his days at an adult skateboarding camp, lost in nostalgia while hunting for affirmation that would “clarify my relationship to my past, and, in so doing, help me lean into the future as if it were a headwind.” Knapp sees stories everywhere, committed to a belief that the lives around him are each their own unwritten memoirs. While a curious, self-conscious take on memoir, Knapp’s essays are often overwrought. The prolix “Neighborhood Watch” is a story of gentrification and the intersection of neighboring lives in the aftermath of a local man’s murder. The author ponders, again, “the vital and vivifying mystery” of life, that another person’s existence can be so different yet “so close to where the epic drama of your own life is set.” “Why can’t I get out of my own way?” he asks in one essay. “Seems I’m always getting caught in the sticky wicket of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story’s being told. Overaware that a story’s being told. My default mode tends to be this one of narration, meaning, roughly, that an experience doesn’t really become ‘real’ for me until it’s prosed.” These essays, often about trying to be stories we’re not, are carried by Knapp’s struggle toward self-acceptance.

A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-6102-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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INTO THE WILD

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.

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)

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

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