Readers are likely to finish the book more confused than illuminated by all the possibilities, theories, and potential...
The author revisits the murder that spawned his best-known book, The Family (1971).
Before the Manson family murders, Sanders (Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, 2011, etc.) was known primarily as the frontman for the Fugs. He was also a poet and political agitator. Yet his bestselling Manson book was a surprisingly straightforward work of first-rate journalism, and it enjoyed commercial success beyond anything he had previously done. As he explains in this decades-later follow-up, it was the release of a largely forgotten solo album, “Sanders Truckstop,” that brought him to Los Angeles in 1969 and placed him in the midst of the terror surrounding the ritualistic serial murders. The first part of this book is a standard movie-star bio, relating Tate’s ascent from beauty-contest queen to Hollywood sex symbol, with much of it featuring overly long synopses of films that don’t warrant them as well as career curiosities. Tate’s career arc intersects with that of Roman Polanski, soon to be her husband, and the series of strange films he had made or was considering. The book builds, as the author’s earlier one did, to the murders, with lots of warmed-over detail and rumors, reportage, and perspective from the four decades since. “In the over forty years since I first became involved in writing and researching this case, some things have never made sense,” writes the author, who admits that it remains “a lingering mystery” why Tate and the others were targeted. Speculation includes: she wasn’t supposed to be there, she was part of a satanic cult, she knew things she shouldn’t about Sirhan Sirhan, she was involved in a high-profile home pornography ring, and the murders were part of an attempt to cover up previous murders or a contract hit for a drug deal gone bad.
Readers are likely to finish the book more confused than illuminated by all the possibilities, theories, and potential co-conspirators.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-81889-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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