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JOHN CIARDI

Name: JOHN CIARDI
Author: Edward M. Cifelli
ISBN: 1-55728-448-2

A BIOGRAPHY

by Edward M. Cifelli ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 1997

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After editing collections of Ciardi's letters and poetry, Cifelli offers a record of Ciardi's accomplished life. As this diligently detailed biography shows, though Ciardi (who died in 1986) never got his long-hoped-for Pulitzer or a mandatory place in the anthologies, he compensated with a career that was lengthy, varied, and industrious—not to mention profitable. Ciardi, who became one of America's wealthier men of letters, was born in 1916 to an immigrant Italian family whose modest means were further diminished by his father's early death. A series of awards and useful contracts sped Ciardi's climb. He received the Hopwood Prize while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, gained an early contract with the New Yorker, secured teaching jobs at Harvard and Rutgers, and struck an editorial alliance with Twayne Publishers. On his elevation to directorship of the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Robert Frost wrote to him in 1956, ``By all signs [God] is playing you for one of his favorite boys, professor, publisher, lecturer, director, and accepted poet''—which left out Ciardi's success as the translator of an immensely popular, distinctly American version of Dante's Divine Comedy. Cifelli omits nothing in tracing the arc of Ciardi's life in letters, even noting the later dips, such as the negligible reception of his personal favorite among his books, Lives of X, and his ouster at Bread Loaf in 1972. Although Cifelli is less a narrator than a documenter, his use of Ciardi's letters, poems, and autobiographical fragments (and even his FBI file, begun in Ciardi's leftist days) makes up a more than adequate portrait, particularly of his wartime experience as a B-29 gunner in the Pacific theater and his contentious tenure as poetry editor of the Saturday Review. Never part of any movement or school, except perhaps that of craftsmanship, Ciardi's busy life spanned many hectic decades, and Cifelli provides a lively record of the man and his times. (31 illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1997

ISBN: 1-55728-448-2

Page Count: 592

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997

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)