Readers interested in academic administration or the history of American universities would do well to spend a couple hours...
The first woman to serve as president of a major research university intermingles her impressive life story with the history of American higher education in the 20th century.
Despite her incredibly impressive resume, Gray (Emeritus, Early Modern European History/Univ. of Chicago; Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories, 2011) is one of those powerful women with whom readers are likely unfamiliar. With the reserved good humor of someone whose goals have all been met, the author gives a precisely detailed record of her life and brilliant career among some of the world’s most gifted intellectuals. The daughter of professors exiled from Germany in the 1930s, she spent her childhood on the Yale campus living out her parents' European ideals with second-generation American energy. After her education at Bryn Mawr and Harvard, she taught Renaissance and Reformation history, and her colleagues quickly learned to value her knack for untangling unforeseen problems and deriving consensus from warring interests. These skills earned her invitations to be a dean at Northwestern and later provost of Yale, and they served her well for more than 15 years as president of the University of Chicago. True to form, she intends her life story to accomplish more than the typical career retrospective, translating her experiences into an insider's history of the perennial struggles and vast changes in higher education during her tenure. Gray never misses an opportunity to pause in her own story to laud the achievements of her fellow second-generation scholars, including many Nobel Prize winners. Her recurring meditations on the perennial questions of academia—the purpose of higher education, where to draw the boundaries of free speech, what to do with football—enliven some of the more tedious recollections. The author never wavers from her ideal vision of a university free from political entanglements as the key to preserving academic freedom.
Readers interested in academic administration or the history of American universities would do well to spend a couple hours in Gray’s edifying company.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17918-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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