A fresh and color-drenched memoir by an artist unafraid to offend.
Vivid portraits, affectionate but unsparing, of people encountered by Nobel laureate Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, 1998, etc.) while living in England.
Canetti (1905–94) was very social, and he encountered a good swathe of personalities from the moment he arrived in England in 1939. He found warmth, sensitivity and integrity in the ordinary folks who swept streets and rented rooms. He was less taken with the artists, intellectuals, politicians and aristocrats who constituted the bulk of his acquaintance (and a cross-section of England’s hierarchy). T.S. Eliot represented for Canetti all that was thin-lipped, cold-hearted and prematurely old in British life. Of Eliot’s fame, he writes, “Is it possible ever to repent sufficiently of that?” He was just as judgmental about Iris Murdoch, though she had been his occasional lover: “Iris is what I would call an ‘illegitimate’ writer. She never suffered from having to write.” Recounting his associations with a panorama of English characters, Canetti is by turns a memoirist, satirist and anthropologist. The volcanic emotions expressed here are perhaps best understood as his response to the chilliness of British manners. He hated the polite, implacably hierarchal laws of English society, a stance that allowed him to admire Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s passion while stating that “I don’t know that I have ever encountered anyone quite so antithetical to everything I stand for.” He found more common ground with thoughtful eccentrics like the inventor Geoffrey Pyke and the Orientalist Arthur Waley. Before leaving for Zurich in 1984, Canetti got off a final salvo, this one at Margaret Thatcher’s government: “the claque of the apostles of selfishness.”
A fresh and color-drenched memoir by an artist unafraid to offend.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-8112-1636-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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