A tantalizing glimpse of a lost world. Although she asks the question in her preface, Pevitt never directly reveals an answer as to why someone at the end of the 20th century would become obsessed with someone dead for 300 years. Readers are forced to answer that question themselves, and they might be glad that Pevitt became so involved in a figure who, until now, has not received sympathetic treatment in English. French historians have for some time now been taking a new look at the duc d`OrlÇans, recognizing that he was much more than the philanderer and intellectual lightweight he had been made out to be. When his uncle the Sun King, Louis XIV, died in 1715, a remarkable era came to an end. While the five-year-old Louis XV became de jure king, it was Philippe who actually ruled as regent. In some ways a Renaissance man (he was a musician and artist as well as a soldier and statesman), Philippe delighted in shocking the more conventional members of the royal family and court. Extraordinary rumors (including the claim that he had slept with his own daughter) circulated through aristocratic circles. This, though, seems to have been a calculated strategy to hide his rather formidable talents. As regent, Pevitt argues, he displayed considerable iamgination and energy. He worked hard to rebuild the country's armed forces, began negotiations with England, France's ancient antagonist, and did what he could to spur on emigration to North America. (His efforts are indicated by the fact that New Orleans was named in his honor). Pevitt is not a professional historian, but this in no way detracts from her work; in fact, readers might find her style refreshing and thankfully free from academic pretensions. It seems that she wrote the book for no other reason than that the subject fascinated her—and what better reason could a reader ask for in an author?
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87113-695-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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