Sex, drugs, and an obsession with ``my writing'' dominate this self-absorbed journal of a nonetheless remarkable teenager. Runaway was a bestseller in Canada, although it's not clear why. While this 14-year-old's diary is steamy in its descriptions of front-seat sex, it's also raw and unfinished in its conventional and self-conscious prose. Now 23, Lau (Fresh Girls and Other Stories, 1995), a Chinese-Canadian, ran away from her Vancouver home when she was only 14 to escape overprotective parents with impossibly high standards. Although she was already a published poet, she was also bulimic and thinking of suicide. Sheltered after her escape from home by a network of young activists, she was retrieved quickly by Canada's social service network. But Lau never returned to live with her parents. Instead, she slipped in and out of the interstices of the safety net, at one point fleeing to Boston. Too far from home, she turned herself in to be brought back to Vancouver by her social workers, who complainedwith justiceabout the money and effort being expended to lasso her. Placed in a series of group and foster homes when she wasn't on the street or on the run, Lau was eventually allowed her own apartment. From there, she dipped even more deeply into prostitution (in cars and vans, no penetration), drugs (Valium, LSD, methadone, and more), and suicide (three attempts), telling all to two psychiatrists and what seems to be a rasher of frustrated but endlessly patient social workers. But she also went back to school and never stopped writingeither her journal or poems submitted to various magazines, some of which were accepted and published, as was this diary. Outspoken but without insight, naive but capable of inflicting great pain: Lau's adolescent reflections aredespite their shock valueno more than that.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88910-491-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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