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LITTLE CHAPEL ON THE RIVER

Name: LITTLE CHAPEL ON THE RIVER
Author: Gwendolyn Bounds
ISBN: 0-06-056406-7

A PUB, A TOWN AND THE SEARCH FOR WHAT MATTERS MOST

by Gwendolyn Bounds ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2005

Faithful attempt. Still, it could be that you had to be there.

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Forced to relocate from downtown Manhattan after 9/11, a career woman discovers warmth, camaraderie and more in a small-town barroom.

Here’s one for you: there’s this tavern run by, of all things, an Irishman. But for Wall Street Journal columnist Bounds (“call me Wendy”), a displaced renter in Garrison, N.Y., after the Twin Towers fell too close to her apartment building, one of the most entrenched clichés in America’s alcohol culture becomes a place of refuge and reflection. As the author plumbs the boozy ambience of Guinan’s, hard by the Hudson River across from West Point, the aging diabetic owner Jim Guinan and his daughter Margaret, a somewhat hard-bitten detective on the local force who essentially runs the place in her off-hours, lead a cast of characters—their customers—who tend to become poets and philosophers instantly upon entry. The good and bad news here is that everyone who has frequented a similar venue to the extent that it becomes known as one’s watering-hole has met and enjoyed—or sometimes been appalled by—people like these. The lawyer, the salesman, the silent war hero, the guy down on his luck, the guy with the bad jokes: all are in residence as components in the slice-of-life Bounds offers with the implication that the reader should look beyond stereotypes, as does she. But it’s not until some 60 pages have gone by in this encounter between the willowy blonde in her early 30s and the predominantly older males who belly up at Guinan’s, that the reader is let in on the fact that she’s in a gay relationship. Later, when she realizes she must, in a lip-biting encounter, explain to Jim that “Kathryn is not my sister,” it provides one of the memoir’s few originally engaging scenes.

Faithful attempt. Still, it could be that you had to be there.

Pub Date: July 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-056406-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | 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)