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POSTCARDS FROM STANLAND

Name: POSTCARDS FROM STANLAND
Author: David H. Mould
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2177-2

JOURNEYS IN CENTRAL ASIA

by David H. Mould ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2016

As a genial travel guide, Mould, an academic who doesn’t write like an academic, shows how one should resist the temptations...

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An illuminating travelogue through Central Asia.

Born in England, where he worked as a journalist, Mould (Dividing Lines: Canals, Railroads and Urban Rivalry in Ohio's Hocking Valley, 1825-1875, 1994, etc.) came to America in 1978 for graduate school and became a faculty member at Ohio University, where he is now a professor emeritus of media studies. His background thus provides contrast with the experiences that inform the book. “Since the mid-1990s,” he writes, “I’ve traveled to Central Asia, mostly to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, more than a dozen times to teach at universities, lead workshops for journalists and educators, consult with TV and radio stations, and conduct research.” The author recognizes that the two countries he names will be unfamiliar to a general readership. Yet these and other nations that have arisen in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union are among the world’s largest, though subject to name changes within the cities of their blurring borders and shifting perspectives to the legacies of Lenin, Stalin, and Soviet repression. Mould plainly feels considerable affection for the people he brings to life here, while his extended experiences in “Stanland” are marked by a tension between illumination and frustration. “I don’t deliberately stay in rundown Soviet-era hotels so I can write about them later,” he writes. “Sometimes, there’s just no alternative.” The author covers a lot of ground, historically and geographically, taking readers from rural areas to industrial regions to sites contaminated by nuclear testing that its natives refuse to leave. He provides some educational direction in cultures where professors generally teach by lecturing, rather than working with prospective journalists on how to practice their craft, where students and professors alike admit to engaging in bribery, and where officials believe “the goal of journalism education should be to prepare students to work in government media and corporate public relations.”

As a genial travel guide, Mould, an academic who doesn’t write like an academic, shows how one should resist the temptations to stereotype a culture too easily and understand it too quickly.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8214-2177-2

Page Count: 344

Publisher: Ohio Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)