by Dee Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2014
A lightweight curiosity that will find sympathy with readers frustrated with the conventional rat race.
His was 150 square feet and hers was 84, but Henry David Thoreau and newcomer Williams find significant common ground in their little abodes.
Though Thoreau didn’t spend a lot of time regaling us about living in his cabin by Walden, and Williams spends a great deal of time describing living in hers, they shared the same desire: to pare down their lives. “I imagined,” she writes, “I’d learn something about myself by stripping down to the basics—by living with two dinner plates, three spoons, two pairs of pants, a dress, and my wool skivvies…with humility and gratitude.” While Thoreau wandered off into the briars of transcendentalism, Williams hews to the quotidian. She was also disturbed, to say the least, by a mysterious, potentially mortal heart ailment and has a defibrillator built into her heart, which, when activated, feels “like being Tasered from the inside out.” The author amiably narrates her story of building a tiny, portable space, off the grid (except for a propane heater), complete with a composting toilet and enough room to turn around without having to kick the dog from the house. She chronicles how she found ancient planks of wood to use as siding, learned how to use her eyes and intuition when building, joined the “Flannel Shirt Club” and became an all-around do-it-yourself builder, minimizing unused materials. Williams also displays a light humor, though she occasionally lapses into what is not so much quirky as chirpy. However, the narrative is tempered by the somber thoughts of the deaths of two close friends. “For me,” she writes, “the idea of living small has always involved being curious—taking a look at how my day-to-day is connected to the larger world...[and] the delicate universe that sits between my ears.”
A lightweight curiosity that will find sympathy with readers frustrated with the conventional rat race.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16617-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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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