The brief, years-later section tacked on at the end is insubstantial, following, as it does, the scorched earth of what came...
A childhood you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy: a series of mistakes, tribulations, and brutality, tempered by the sanctuary of an uncle’s farm in the Catskills.
Related in the third person, which affords a modest buffer to the story’s grim terrain, novelist Peck (Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, 1998, etc.) tells of his alcoholic father stealing into his room, which he shared with seven brothers and sisters, in the middle of the night, toothless and giddy on cough syrup, whining (“I owe my troubles to a savage wife”) and slurring that he wants Dale out of the squalor and the thrashings he receives from his mother, administered with a length of hose complete with the metal head. The dairy farm of Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie is no walk in the park, a shambles of an operation—“Dinner, sleep, morning reveille and sixty swollen udders eager to be drained, world without end, amen”—that Peck helps to drive almost insolvent. There are a few shining set pieces here: when Peck embraces a sense of place (“the land, history, time itself, absorbs all the things people forgo and forget”); and again, when a cow nears death as a result of his bungling, when he curls up next to the cow’s belly, warm as a campfire in the winter night, pining for “the body-stuffed bed of his parents’ house,” despite its unspeakable occupants. His ultimate choice of immediate family over the aunt and uncle is mind-boggling, especially after another depiction of his father, crawling around the floor of the family house, thoroughly inebriated, being humiliated by wife and police officers: “Mercy, sir,” the father pleads, and then fouls himself.
The brief, years-later section tacked on at the end is insubstantial, following, as it does, the scorched earth of what came before.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-25128-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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