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JANE AUSTEN THE WOMAN

Name: JANE AUSTEN THE WOMAN
Author: George Holbert Tucker
ISBN: 0-312-12049-4

SOME BIOGRAPHICAL INSIGHTS

by George Holbert Tucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 1994

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Instead of the promised revelations from hitherto censored materials offering a more ``vibrant'' Jane Austen, Tucker assembles a reference guide to Austen's life, a genealogy of her relatives, friends, some people she never met at all, and gossip long since refuted. Readers who savor connectedness, relationships, coincidence, and triviality may appreciate this reference guide to Austen's social life, already depicted ironically in her novels. Here are the provincial towns (Steventon, Bath, Southampton, and Chawton), the flirtations, friends, cousins, scandals, the places she traveled (not far, not many), her religious practices, and the people she almost knew, that literary demimonde of Regency England. William Beckford's uncle was married to her brother's wife's aunt; another aunt's cousin was a friend of George Crabbe; an uncle's barrister was William Cowper's confidante; and seven years after Austen's death, Byron's body lay in state in her niece's London parlor. Austen's neighbors at Steventon, like her neighbors everywhere, their houses' lineages, occupations, and marriages are delineated with the same care and affection as are the men she flirted with, didn't marry, and even the women they didn't marry. These men had the unlikely names of Digweed, Fowle, Heartley, and Powlett; there's an unsubstantiated rumor of a summer romance with John Wordsworth, the brother of the poet. Tucker (a Virginia-based journalist and author of A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family, not reviewed) describes Austen's interest in private theatricals, piano, art, dancing, her attitude toward the foppish prince regent, her reading, and her interest in the scandals, suicides, affairs, elopements, and petty crimes of friends and relatives. The very kind of pedantry that elicited Austen's most stinging satire, reproducing the whole petty and suffocating social network her fiction indicts.

Pub Date: June 6, 1994

ISBN: 0-312-12049-4

Page Count: 270

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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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)