A cautionary but sympathetic story of a man obsessed, though less perniciously than most.
Sensitive chronicle of a complex man who came to Africa to found his own kingdom, built a castle for the woman he loved, and ruled his subjects with a firm but benevolent hand.
Born in 1873, Stewart Gore-Browne was a Victorian shaped by the ideals of his time: service to country, the betterment of those less fortunate, romantic love for a perfect, unattainable woman. Educated at Harrow, he spent most of his time with his father’s younger sister Ethel and her wealthy, much older husband Hugh. Intelligent and beautiful, Ethel inspired a lifelong devotion in Gore-Browne, who wrote to her regularly, confided in her, and dreamed that she would someday come to live in the “Africa house” he built for her. In early 1914, seconded to an Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commission as a British officer, Gore-Browne first saw Shiwa Ngandu, the “Lake of the Royal Crocodiles” in what is today northern Zambia, and immediately recognized it as the kingdom he had dreamed of. World War I intervened, but in 1920 he was back in Africa, the owner of 23,000 acres, at work on the house and the model village he had so long planned. Food, furniture, and all other necessities had to travel by land and canoe more than 400 miles from the nearest rail halt, and Lamb, foreign-affairs correspondent of London’s Sunday Times, vividly details how extraordinary Gore-Browne’s overly ambitious achievement was. In a place where lions and crocodile regularly ate the unwary and leopards peeked in the windows, he built a three-story building, “part Tuscan manor house, part grand English ancestral home,” surrounded by gardens and orchards. Lamb (The Sewing Circles of Herat, not reviewed) chronicles his unhappy marriage to a much younger woman, his failed agricultural ventures, and the house’s evolution into a famous landmark. She also describes Gore-Browne’s commitment to Zambia’s independence and to African education, as well as his friendship with the newly independent nation’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda.
A cautionary but sympathetic story of a man obsessed, though less perniciously than most.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-073587-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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