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UNCERTAIN MANIFESTO

Name: UNCERTAIN MANIFESTO
Author: Frédéric Pajak
ISBN: 978-1-68137-286-0

by Frédéric Pajak ; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 2019

A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.

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An author and illustrator meditates on the need to remember the past in order to understand the present.

As a 10-year-old growing up on the banks of the Seine in the 1960s, Pajak “dreamt of a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea.” But, as he puts it, “my book died every day.” Years later, he found his theme: “The evocation of erased History and of the war of time,” by which he means “the war waged by a present stripped of its past, crumbled into an improbable future, be it radiant or disenchanted.” Most pages display Pajak’s black-and-white drawings followed by short paragraphs. The author writes of the many artists and writers who grappled with the 20th century’s most significant questions, most notably the fascism and anti-Semitism embodied not only in figures like Hitler and Mussolini, but also in a pair of Pajak’s boarding school classmates, one of whom performed the Nazi salute when teachers left the room and “was always fulminating against the Jews.” Among the figures Pajak cites are Samuel Beckett, artist Bram van Velde, and Walter Benjamin, especially Benjamin’s time in Spain before the Spanish Civil War and his belief that “the supposed universality of History lacked the mute voice of the oppressed.” If some drawing-prose combinations are too on-the-nose—a picture of a fort as the author notes that Benjamin likened Andre Gidé’s thoughts to a fort—others offer witty contrasts, as when he pairs childhood memories of the smell of his grandmother’s flat with a drawing of himself smoking as a young boy. Some of the combinations are chilling: A drawing of an emaciated man in a concentration camp appears on the same page on which Pajak cites Benjamin’s awareness of the rise of anti-Semitism among French intellectuals.

A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.

Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-68137-286-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: New York Review Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | 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)