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THAT BOOK ABOUT HARVARD

Name: THAT BOOK ABOUT HARVARD
Author: Eric Kester
ISBN: 978-1-4022-6750-5

SURVIVING THE WORLD'S MOST (IN)FAMOUS UNIVERSITY, ONE EMBARRASSMENT AT A TIME

by Eric Kester ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2012

College humor is supposed to be a little lowbrow, but Kester is stuck in a mode of repetitive and ultimately tiring gags.

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In which the author copes with attending the world’s most demanding institution of higher learning by reducing it to middle-school jokes.

Like many freshmen at Harvard, Kester suffered a rude awakening during his first weeks on campus: The smartest kid in his hometown had quickly morphed into, at best, a mediocrity. Academically he couldn’t crack calculus, and he was performing poorly everywhere else too: He locked himself out of his dorm room on move-in day, wearing only his boxers; he rode the bench on the football team; he felt alienated from the sons of old-money Brahmins at the campus’ final clubs. Such modest suffering shouldn’t merit a full-length memoir, a shortcoming Kester attempts to resolve by couching every modest indignity in lowbrow humor. If the book’s cast of characters aren’t actually invented, they certainly adhere to college-comedy stereotypes: the hotheaded football coach, the nerdy math whiz who uses hip-hop slang to boast about his nonexistent sexual prowess, the wacky roommate and the out-of-touch college president. The book’s driving force is the most clichéd stereotype of all: the gorgeous, unattainable co-ed. Much of the first half of the book follows Kester’s mooning over this “smokeshow” from a distance, his attempts to catch her attention derailed by some embarrassment or other. The author alternates anecdotes about the downsides of Harvard life (Adderall popping, cheating, constant insecurity) with tales of hijinks. But his comfort zone is cheeseball shtick, from mocking foreign accents to bathroom humor—which makes the final pages’ platitudes about growing maturity and respect for diversity ring all the more hollow.

College humor is supposed to be a little lowbrow, but Kester is stuck in a mode of repetitive and ultimately tiring gags.

Pub Date: July 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4022-6750-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)