Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.
Former Reuters journalist Eaves reflects on her years as an exotic dancer in Seattle, the path that led her there, and why she’ll never go back.
“I had a deep distaste for clothing as a child,” she tells us. Other than a fondness for nudity, however, Eaves seemed to exhibit few girlhood indicators for her eventual stage work, raised as she was by scholarly parents who emphasized the importance of intellectual achievement over all other. But it was this exclusive focus on the cerebral, the writer insists, that made her all the more determined to explore gender issues and sexuality, which began puzzling her as soon as she hit adolescence and was confronted with a seemingly arbitrary moral universe. Irritated by the rules required of nice girls, she became fascinated with what she perceived as the sexual freedom enjoyed by strippers. After graduating from college and moving in with her boyfriend in Seattle, she finally took the plunge and began dancing naked at the Lusty Lady. Twelve months passed and she gave it up, moved on, and got a graduate degree at Columbia; years later, however, she was driven to return to the exhibitionist profession to explore why, exactly, she’d done it in the first place. Her personal justifications for taking up dancing (pursuit of personal freedom and stereotype-busting) and giving it up (it was screwing with her behavior in relationships) are unremarkable. The strength of the work lies in her non-sensational, balanced look at her coworkers, with all of their singular histories, and at the backstage of a strip parlor, with the attendant headaches of workplace etiquette and labor relations.
Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41233-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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