British comedy-star Everage, nÇe Barry Humphreys, takes us little people into her confidence with this terribly earnest autobiography of an Australian housewife turned megacelebrity— broad but successful buffoonery in the Monty Python tradition. Let's face it, Possums, not everyone is destined for megastardom—but Dame Everage makes if perfectly clear that the signs of greatness hung over her from birth. First, there was the mauve hair, which she modestly colored brown during her young- mother period in Moonee Ponds, the suburb of Melbourne where she grew up. Then there was the quick intelligence that made her captain of her class in school (``I'm sorry but I was''), and, of course, the ``spooky'' karma left over from her former lives as Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, Lady Macbeth, Florence Nightingale, and Ethel Merman—reincarnations that even the Dame's good friend Shirl is terribly jealous of. And of course the appearance of her stunning ``face furniture,'' the signature butterfly-shaped eyeglasses with the jumbo upsweeps at the corners, didn't hurt her determinedly cheerful image. As the good Dame breathlessly describes her marriage to dear Norman Stoddart Everage, a former department-store clerk destined for 24-hour prostate support; her struggle to find someone to raise her three children properly; her love-hate relationship with her envious bridesmaid and companion, Madge Allsop; and her first encounter with fame as winner of Australia's ``Lovely Mother Quest,'' it becomes clear that Everage's philosophy of simply getting up on a stage and giving her grateful audiences ``a gentle, blow-by-blow description of a housewife's life'' is the key to sold-out performances in London theaters and long, late-night phone conversations with her good friends Liz, Jackie, Marlon, Gore, et al. No Plom's (Poor Little Old Me) Disease here—though readers who haven't yet seen one of Edna's performances may be left a bit bewildered.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70976-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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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