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CAPTIVE

Name: CAPTIVE
Author: Clara Rojas
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5695-7

by Clara Rojas ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2010

A disappointingly superficial, unrevealing adventure memoir.

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Another perspective on the most famous hostage case in Colombia's troubled recent history.

Rojas, a lawyer and former legislator, was captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2002 with her friend, presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. The author would have been all but overshadowed by her world-famous co-captive—whose saintly reputation was sullied by the 2009 book Out of Captivity, written by three Americans held hostage in the same camp—had it not been for the fact that two years into her captivity, she became pregnant and delivered a baby boy via crude field-medicine techniques. Except for her capture and release and a couple of escapes that she and Betancourt attempted early on, the birth merits the majority of Rojas's attention. Though she maintains the mystery of her son Emmanuel's paternity, she writes that the pregnancy caused friction between her and her fellow hostages. She and Betancourt had fallen out after the escape attempts, but unlike the authors of the previous book, Rojas doesn't dwell on her friend's flaws. Rojas claims that she never sympathized with the guerrillas and holds righteous anger toward them for robbing her of six years of her life and separating her from Emmanuel not long after his birth, but the rebels' decency toward her, particularly during her pregnancy, shines through in contrast to the pettiness of her co-captives. Undoubtedly, the author's courage in withstanding her ordeal marks her as an unusual person with an extraordinary story to tell. Unfortunately, the narrative doesn't live up to the subject. Rojas says she wrote the book to put this unpleasant experience behind her and move on. In fact, she seems to have already been in the process of emotionally escaping from it as she wrote about it, resulting in a quick, light-handed sketch composed from a cautious distance.

A disappointingly superficial, unrevealing adventure memoir.

Pub Date: May 25, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4391-5695-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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.

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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

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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...

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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)