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I HAD A FATHER

Name: I HAD A FATHER
Author: Clark Blaise
ISBN: 0-201-58128-0

by Clark Blaise ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1993

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A personal memoir that for honesty, interest, and the steadiness of its inner searching equals the very best of its kind, bringing to mind, for example, books like Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation. Longtime fiction writer Blaise, now past 50, sets out once and for all to determine who he is and where he's from, neither of these questions being simple ones in Blaise's case. ``I'm a native of nowhere,'' he writes; ``I do not know where I come from because I have come from just about everywhere.'' He was born in North Dakota to a mother from Winnipeg and to a French-Canadian father who remains the central and governing mystery in his life, and who, as a glamorously alluring but compulsively self-detructive businessman and salesman, moved his wife and son endlessly from place to place in the southern, eastern, and middlewestern US throughout the years of Blaise's growing up. Geographically rootless, Blaise's life was wildly indeterminate also in matters of social class (his mother was educated, his father was not) and ethnic identity—his father, secretive and less than honest in numerous other ways as well, tried to keep his French-Canadian origins hidden, even changing his name in a doomed effort to ``mainstream'' himself into the American middle class. Out of these family origins of ethnic and cultural indeterminacy and ambiguity- -family life also included divorce, violence, loss, and abandonment—Blaise has fashioned his own often exquisitely beautiful narrative of emergent selfhood and literary coming of age, assembling a lyrically quilt-like history of family and self that isn't afraid—the book becomes a kind of latter-day Huck Finn- -to take as part of its natural theme the unformed and often barbaric conscience of a nation. A compelling and unflaggingly intelligent autobiography from the author of two novels and four books of stories (including A North American Education), now director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Pub Date: April 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-201-58128-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS TIME, THAT PLACE
by Clark Blaise

- BOOK REVIEW
TIME LORD
by Clark Blaise

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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)