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YOU'RE NEVER WEIRD ON THE INTERNET (ALMOST)

A MEMOIR

Day is delightfully good company and has an interesting story to tell, but a richer work would have made more room for a...

Actress Day, best known for her “geek goddess” roles in such nerd-culture touchstones as the Web series The Guild and various Joss Whedon projects, recounts her unusual upbringing and the neuroses-strewn path that led to her obsessions with fantasy, science fiction, gaming, and online communities.

Diffidently home schooled by an eccentric, indulgent mother, the author and her brother were largely left to pursue their particular passions in an environment of social isolation. Day responded by immersing herself in the imaginative worlds of escapist genre fiction and video games, forging communities of like-minded introverts over the nascent World Wide Web—when she was not busy excelling at advanced mathematics and the violin, achievements that would land her in college at an age years younger than her peers, further exacerbating her social awkwardness. Day writes charmingly of her cluelessness and determination throughout her career, but there is a dark undercurrent to her drive to succeed, no matter how arbitrary the reward. From “leveling up” in an online game to maintaining a perfect (and perfectly useless, post-graduation) GPA, Day has always pursued her goals with a manic focus seemingly driven entirely by fear and panicky self-doubt. This compulsive nature led to addiction problems, interpersonal chaos, and extended periods of depression. The author’s feelings about her prominent role in the misogyny-drenched “Gamergate” scandal, which she reveals here with raw anger and hurt simmering beneath her breezy, kooky gal patter, suggest a painful ambivalence about the costs and rewards of the indoor, fantastical, virtual life—a fascinating thread that is too glancingly addressed throughout the book.

Day is delightfully good company and has an interesting story to tell, but a richer work would have made more room for a consideration of the darker aspects of geek culture.

Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4767-8565-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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INTO THE WILD

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.

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)

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

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