Gossipy at times, mostly serious about literary life, and always smoothly written.
The acclaimed literary editor and biographer offers an extraordinarily candid autobiography.
Readers hoping for background on how Tomalin (Charles Dickens: A Life, 2011, etc.) chose the subjects of her acclaimed biographies—Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hardy, among other major figures—may be somewhat disappointed, but this is an elegant, significant book nonetheless. The author does not mention launching biography writing as her vocation until more than halfway through the book. Readers seeking a detailed account of Tomalin’s influential life within British letters will certainly celebrate her honest perceptions of herself, her parents and in-laws, husbands, children, other authors and editors, publishers, tycoons, and other important historical figures. After she married journalist Nick Tomalin, the author’s life felt adventurous almost every day. Nick was a talented writer, a handsome charmer, and a philanderer whose romantic exploits Claire usually tolerated. She undertook extramarital romances, as well, though far fewer than her husband. Still, she and Nick had four children before he died in 1973 during a battle in Israel, where he had been sent on assignment by a British publication. About the period, she writes, “suddenly I found myself living through the most banal of stories, as the neglected wife of a faithless husband….My role now was as the boring suburban wife with too many children who held him back.” As a widow, Tomalin found love with a much younger Martin Amis, among other suitors. She provided for her family with full-time editing jobs (New Statesman, Sunday Times, etc.), part-time freelancing as a literary critic, and her biographies. Her life has also seen tragedy: Her son (“an inspiration to me”) suffers from a lifelong severe physical birth defect as well as learning disabilities, and one of her three daughters committed suicide. At age 60, the author married again, this time to accomplished playwright Michael Frayn.
Gossipy at times, mostly serious about literary life, and always smoothly written.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56291-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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