Talese shows in an amiably digressive way that this writer’s life has comprised not just celebrity and success, but many...
Veteran journalist Talese (Unto the Sons, 1992, etc.) revisits his youth and education.
The rather odd framing device, since the author says he was never a fan, concerns soccer. Quite by accident, Talese watched on television the American women’s shoot-out victory in the 1999 World Cup. What interested him most was the Chinese player, Liu Ying, whose blocked kick made possible the American victory. How did she feel? How was she greeted when she returned to China? Four hundred pages later, we find out when the writer crosses the Pacific to interview her. In between, Talese takes a long and winding road through his life and career, a genial journey that for the most part is both enjoyable and illuminating. Maintaining a mostly non-linear chronology, he tells us about friendships with folks like boxer Floyd Patterson and baseball manager George Steinbrenner. We learn about the author’s difficulties in high-school English, his experiences at the University of Alabama (the only college that accepted him), his decade-long career at the New York Times. “Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch,” he writes. Then Talese invites us to consider two big projects that just never worked: a book about a site in New York City that held a succession of failed restaurants (he calls it the Willy Loman Building) and a story about Lorena and John Bobbitt that Tina Brown nixed at the New Yorker. Two pieces about Selma, Ala., work out better: The writer was there in 1965 for the marches and mayhem, then returned in 1990 to research a gripping story about an interracial marriage.
Talese shows in an amiably digressive way that this writer’s life has comprised not just celebrity and success, but many false starts, failures and frustrations.Pub Date: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-41096-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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