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HER HUSBAND

Name: HER HUSBAND
Author: Diane Middlebrook
ISBN: 0-670-03187-9

HUGHES AND PLATH: A MARRIAGE

by Diane Middlebrook ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2003

Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)

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Another examination of the passion, poetry, infidelity, depression, ambition, lies, and suffering that have made Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath the most notorious couple in modern literary history.

Middlebrook (Anne Sexton, 1991, etc.) did much research for this latest brick in the now-imposing edifice of material about Plath and Hughes. She examined the Hughes papers, now available to scholars at Emory University, as well as the Plath archive at Smith College. She refers early and often, as well, to Hughes’s two 1998 volumes dealing with Plath, Birthday Letters and the lesser-known Howls and Whispers, which appeared in an edition of 110 copies. Middlebrook endeavors to withhold judgment about Hughes’s behavior with Plath and her successors, but his actions as a serial adulterer speak quite eloquently. As does his poetry, from which the author quotes liberally. She speculates about the “disappearance” of some key Plath material, about the contents of a trunk at Emory that cannot be opened until 2023, and about the causes of Plath’s 1963 suicide. Her conclusion about the latter? Depression—hardly a novel insight. Middlebrook begins with the 1956 meeting of her two principals and then moves steadily forward to Hughes’s 1998 death from heart failure and cancer, though some chapters loop to revisit and modify earlier segments. The author makes insightful comments about each poet’s writing, about their individual artistic growth, and about their collaborations: before their break-up, in their impecunious days, they regularly read each other’s work and even composed at the same table. Middlebrook sensitively shows how each helped fashion the other, though some of her psychological observations sound a bit loopy, e.g., he is a “poet-shaman, journeying in the psychological murk of fear and detestation of the female.”

Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2003

ISBN: 0-670-03187-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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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)