A flawed memoir, but one that would make a good gift for a father-to-be searching for a sense of self in the midst of...
Uneven but intimate look at the intersection of fatherhood and cooking.
Men’s Journal contributing editor Duane (A Mouth Like Yours, 2005, etc.) chronicles his newfound fixation on providing for his budding family through cooking. Early on the author relates how, after his daughter was born, he wanted to contribute to the household in a meaningful way. He deduced that the most valuable contribution he could make was “seeing to it that [his] little family ha[d] a delicious, wholesome meal on the table, every single night, forever and ever.” Building on this simple declaration, Duane turned it into an eight-year experiment. As he cooked and learned more about nearly every aspect of the cooking process, his family grew and experienced setbacks and tragedies. Some of Duane’s memoir is self-indulgent; he was obviously searching for something—approval, the meaning of fatherhood, a sense of purpose and self—through his cooking. Though he and his wife had financial issues, Duane insisted on making extravagant, uncompromising meals that no one really wanted to eat. However, the author’s prose is mostly smooth and occasionally beautiful; despite unnecessarily long sentences in certain sections, he effectively immerses readers in his thoughts and feelings. Duane produces a mostly coherent narrative thread, but he does meander into adventures in eating rather than cooking. This tendency may frustrate some readers but should appeal to die-hard foodies looking for their next read.
A flawed memoir, but one that would make a good gift for a father-to-be searching for a sense of self in the midst of life-changing events.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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