Substantial research informs this sympathetic and vibrant biography. (36 b&w photos)
An important, comprehensive view of the pioneering novelist and playwright (1752–1840).
Burney, who has been enjoying a recent revival (Janice Farrar Thaddeus’s Frances Burney, 2000), has a thorough and compassionate critic in Harman (ed., The Diaries of Sylvia Towsend Warner, 1996). Harman acknowledges that the Burney family archive is so extensive that “scholars grow gray” attempting to digest it, but she has managed well the complications of sifting such literary sands. Harman sees Burney as an inventor, not just of novels and plays, but of her own life (her autobiographical writings are notoriously inaccurate). “Is she an inveterate liar,” asks Harman, “or an inveterate writer?” Her answer is the latter. Burney’s celebrated father, Dr. Charles Burney, musician, writer, and teacher, reared a large family, encouraging his children to enjoy the intellectual life. Fanny, the second daughter, was surprisingly slow to read, but once she began, she never really stopped. She was soon writing regularly and composed and published her first novel (Evelina, 1778) without telling her father. She then had the delicious experience of watching friends and family read and enjoy her novel, without knowing its authorship. Her literary celebrity (which was considerable) was several times interrupted, once by her appointment to the court of George III (Burney attended Queen Charlotte for five years), another time by the rise of Napoleon (when Napoleon declared war on England, she was trapped in France for nine years with her French husband). Although the author’s focus is on Fanny, she periodically explores the careers of her siblings (and her sad son, who preceded her in death), a decision that both enriches Fanny’s story and illustrates how remarkable it was. Included are the agonizing details of Burney’s 1811 mastectomy, performed without anesthetic. Harman notes that Fanny was no feminist and would have been “shocked and distressed” to have been classified as such.
Substantial research informs this sympathetic and vibrant biography. (36 b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44658-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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