"The higher he rose, the simpler and purer Ho seemed." Halberstam's little book is likewise simple and pure, more of a commemorative ode than a biography. He emphasizes Ho's personal qualities, his gentleness, his asceticism, his tranquil abiding faith in Vietnamese independence. Ho's thirty years as a revolutionary exile — he was a pastry cook in London, a contributer to L'Humanite in Paris, a student of international communism in Moscow, and a political fugitive all over Southeast Asia — remain as shadowy as ever. Halberstam stresses Ho's desire to arrive at a political accommodation with the French in '46 and again in '54 ("France and Vietnam were married a long time. The marriage has not always been a happy one but we have nothing to gain from breaking it up"); his aversion to China and his continuous strategic though sincere subordination of Communist doctrine to broadly-based Vietnamese nationalism. The French and American involvements are treated as delusion, folly and racial arrogance. The Western predicament was ironically summed up in Graham Greene's The Quiet American and any further sifting of political and military strategies is superfluous. Dien Bien Phu was the retribution for French hubris, and the Americans should have learned a lesson but didn't. Halberstam, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Making of a Quagmire, has obviously renounced his earlier, more equivocal view that South Vietnam "may be worth a larger commitment on our part." Those interested in a more intensive look at Ho's career must go back to Jean Lacouture's Ho Chi Minh (1968).
Pub Date: March 1, 1971
ISBN: 0742559920
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971
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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