by David Giffels ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2018
A lifetime’s worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.
A middle-age man and his father bond over the building of the son’s coffin.
Giffels (English and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of Akron; The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt, 2014, etc.) has written for a wide variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Grantland, and Beavis and Butt-Head (an association that he illuminates in these pages). However, in this highly personal book, he casts himself as very much his father’s son, a can-do man of the Midwest, someone who is happiest when he is busy with some sort of project. The author calls it “ ‘the family disease.’ A restlessness, a compulsion to keep doing things, doing new things and newer things yet, a discomfort with comfort.” So he and his father decided to build a coffin together—but not one for the father, an 81-year-old widower whose own life had been threatened by cancer. They built one for the author, who was in no immediate need of one, except perhaps for literary purposes and for the need to finish the project before his father died. “One of my goals with this endeavor was to learn from him—practical skills and hopefully more,” writes Giffels. “Whatever he would allow. And just to have reason to spend extra time with him.” Intimations of mortality intensified as the author lost his best friend to cancer, shortly following the death of the author’s mother, which had blindsided him. “Grief,” he writes, “has a way of becoming about everything in one’s daily existence….Everything bathed in the sadness of loss.” So, in addition to providing a bonding opportunity with his father, the coffin became a way of dealing with grief and with mortality.
A lifetime’s worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0594-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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
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