A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism.
Chronicle of the chaotic year during which two-time Pushcart Prize–winning author Unferth (English/Wesleyan Univ.; Vacation, 2008, etc.) and her then-boyfriend went from being college coeds to aspiring communist revolutionaries in Central America.
The author recounts the highly unusual journey on which she embarked in 1987. With little more than $2,000 and a bottle of malaria pills, Unferth and her idealistic boyfriend George traversed Central America via buses, from Mexico down to Panama. They had hoped to join the Sandinistas and procure “revolution jobs,” but “it turned out that few people wanted to hire us and if they did, they almost immediately fired us.” Inspired by George, whose inability to deny anyone’s request for money left the couple in a perpetual state of poverty and hunger, Unferth converted from an “atheist Jew” to a “Calvinish-Marxist-Kierkegaardian Christian.” Among the many misadventures that ensued, highlights include stints at a dysfunctional Salvadoran orphanage and a nearby brothel, followed, months later, by their inadvertent participation in an enormous protest against Noriega’s military dictatorship in Panama. The chaste couple, who got engaged on the trip despite Unferth’s mounting doubts about their shared future, struggled with nagging money and visa issues, and were robbed repeatedly, including at knifepoint. After living on a paltry diet consisting mainly of bread, Unferth’s belly grew distended. She also suffered from dysentery, insects that burrowed beneath her skin and a slew of other health problems, all of which she describes in uncomfortably graphic detail. “Mostly,” she writes, “I did not have fun.” Fortunately, Unferth writes with a sly, understated appreciation for the absurd. Though the relationship didn't stick and the author returned to the Midwest, the memories of the trip inspired her earlier writing, subsequent trips to Nicaragua and a private detective–aided search for George.
A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9323-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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
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