A flat, meandering account of the changing fortunes of a South Carolina plantation family, from Bresee, who earlier wrote of his childhood as son of the plantation's dairy manager in Sea Island Yankee, 1986. Using the Lawtons, proprietors of a James Island plantation directly across from Charleston's historic Battery, to illustrate the upheavals experienced by the southern planter class, Bresee traces the family history from the consolidation of cotton-farming lands, through harrowing wartime dislocation, to an eventual switch to dairy production prior to the land's yield to suburban sprawl. The heart of the book, recounted with considerable sympathy for proud and bewildered people ``trapped in a system not of their own making,'' is the Civil War, as family-head Wallace feverishly moves his entire operation first to Beaufort, then to Georgia, then back, rebuilding and torturously readjusting with each wrenching step. Along the way he acquires a rather reluctant 16-year-old bride in his distant cousin Cecilia, and somehow retains the loyalty and devoted service of former slave Peter Brown. Relying largely on two potentially rich sources, Cecilia's diary, and the recollections of Peter Brown as told to the author's father, Bresee creates a drab, anecdotal narrative—filled with ill-timed digressions to his own youth and little outside historical perspective—that reads more like an introduction to a book than a finished product. Nevertheless, the Civil War material, particularly Cecilia's vivid accounts of such horrors as putrefying corpses by the roadside (``everywhere the loathsome buzzard circled slowly above or perched gloatingly on his unresisting prey''), is often riveting, and the picture of people bravely coping with the dissolution of their way of life undeniably poignant. Possibly of some local interest, with the diaries likely worthy of further study. (Twelve pages of photographs.)
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1992
ISBN: 0-945575-55-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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