White can be viewed here and in his other works, no matter what their subjects, as a quintessential travel-writer: His...
The prolific novelist, memoirist and biographer (The Married Man, 2000, etc.) journeys through a lifetime of family, friends, lovers, work and play—at home and abroad.
Whether in fiction or nonfiction, White has essentially been writing about his life for years; he even identifies here the real-life inspirations for some of his fictional characters. But now he directly addresses his own story, inviting readers in a friendly, deceptively casual voice to follow him on a ramble through 65 years of life. White divides the book into fundamental subjects (My Mother, My Father, My Europe, My Friends, etc.), and his text moves in broad swoops. A consideration of Paris, for example, covers not only the years White spent there, writing and knowing the city’s writers, but embraces as well topics including French lessons at a Midwestern prep school and American notions of Parisians. His discourses inevitably come to rest, as his life apparently has, on the matter of love, which he searches out in many guises, finds, loses, then finds again. He recalls the absence of love from a cold, dullish father and the love of a misguided mother that made him wince. Throughout, he muses on his love of men: high-school friends, blond boyfriends and hustlers, a subculture that’s fascinated, excited and satisfied him since he was a young man. Prudes and homophobes beware: The descriptions of his sexual relationships, especially in a section titled “My Master,” are vivid and explicit.
White can be viewed here and in his other works, no matter what their subjects, as a quintessential travel-writer: His cultural, historic and artistic perceptions, as well as his sensory descriptions, are sharp and deeply perceptive, creating a rich sense of time and place.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-621397-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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