bookshelf

I'LL TELL YOU IN PERSON

Name: I'LL TELL YOU IN PERSON
Author: Chloe Caldwell
ISBN: 978-1-56689-453-1

by Chloe Caldwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016

A transitional work that suggests Caldwell has even better books to come.

bookshelf

A major progression finds an essayist outgrowing her self-indulgence.

On earlier book tours, Caldwell (Women, 2014, etc.) admits, she fortified her confidence by doing heroin before readings, and in the earlier pieces in her latest collection, she seems to revel in some of the less-prudent choices she has made over the years—e.g., binging on drugs, soliciting strange men for steak and bourbon on Craigslist, and taking advantage of her employer’s trust. “The cycle went like this: The worse my skin got, the more stressed I felt and the more heroin I would buy,” she writes. “The more heroin I snorted, the worse my skin would get and the more stressed I would become.” Throughout, the author’s confessionalism has an engagingly conversational tone, yet the shock-value solipsism gives way to a stylistic maturity in which the author seems to develop command over her material, resulting in a subtlety lacking in the earlier pieces of the book. Particularly moving is “The Music & the Boys,” in which bonding with male friends, even occasionally flirting with romance, helps her deal with her parents’ separation. “Maybe I didn’t think I had the right to admit I was sad,” she reflects on her younger self. Even better is “Maggie and Me: A Love Story,” about the friendship and mentoring Caldwell experienced with the late writer Maggie Estep and the depth of her loss. As the author deals with sexual fluidity and confusion (“The Laziest Coming Out Story You’ve Ever Heard”), she addresses her developing sense of identity in a way that the younger writer never bothered. She ends the collection sleeping on the floor of Penn Station after an extended visit to Berlin. “I was almost home,” she writes. “I was getting closer to knowing what that meant.”

A transitional work that suggests Caldwell has even better books to come.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-56689-453-1

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

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.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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)