A grim tale full of bite and ache.
Novelist Martin (Our American King, 2007, etc.) charts a hard-bitten existence that spectacularly imploded.
If the author can be held accountable in good measure for burning his adult life to the ground, his childhood was a different matter. Martin draws a circumstantially sympathetic portrait of his father, a complex, thwarted man given to horrific rages who visited fists, kickings and verbal hatred upon his son and more of the same to his mentally unstable wife. The author reserves special ire for his mother, whose erratic behavior caused him much shame and humiliation. Martin’s prose is smoothly clipped, with a surprising amount of bounce, but readers will be singed by scenes of familial violence rendered cinematically and with awful clarity. Having survived the ordeal of childhood, the author proceeded to shoot himself in the foot. While the competent, conscientious “External Reality Team” in his head sought to maintain reasonable behavior, the “Guys in the Back Row” were speaking up for his darkest memories and deepest impulses. As a writer, Martin felt an artistic responsibility to let the Guys have their say, but ultimately they were not his friends, leading him down one self-destructive path after another. Marriage ruined, finances shattered, prospects nil, his diabetes untreated, he felt inside himself the beast his mother helplessly knew so well: “capable of loping into your life, getting you on the ground, and ravaging you.” It has been a long road back, and the voice of the latter pages has a touch of wobble in it. But it’s a hopeful wobble, and he offers some pungent words on living in awareness and how to avoid the beast—or at least not lay out the welcome mat for it.
A grim tale full of bite and ache.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9433-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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