Absorbing social history, if not quite a flesh-and-blood story.
Lost, indeed: Architectural historian Ewing has labored heroically to write the biography of a man whose letters and papers were nearly all consumed in a fire that swept the nascent Smithsonian Institution in 1865.
Undaunted, she pursued bank records, legal documents, professional society archives, diaries and letters from James Smithson’s many correspondents. Smithson (1765–1829) was the illegitimate son of the first Duke of Northumberland; his mother, the Duke’s mistress, could claim also highborn connections and sufficient wealth to enable Smithson’s matriculation at Oxford, his membership in the beau monde, the maintenance of sumptuous bachelor’s quarters in London and an extensive Grand Tour. The tour was not a young man’s pursuit of fun and games (though Smithson did love gambling) so much as a means of meeting the continent’s leading men of science and of adding to his mineral “cabinet.” In the early 1800s, geology, mineralogy and meteorology were the rage, and chemistry was becoming a true science. Smithson, already the youngest member ever admitted to the Royal Society (in 1787), published some papers but mostly enjoyed the company of such leading lights as Priestley, Lavoiser, Cuvier and Davy. He and his circle shared a sense of optimism and progress that led them to admire the Americans’ War of Independence and support the French Revolution. Rough moments in the political aftermath, however, led to Smithson’s imprisonment in Denmark, a country then at war with England. Eventually resettled in London, the lifelong bachelor wrote a will that left his fortune “to found at Washington . . . an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” That the will survived the courts as well as a contentious Congress is in itself an amazing tale—and it might never have happened, Ewing avers, had it not been one man’s heartfelt desire to perpetuate a name that marked him as illegitimate.
Absorbing social history, if not quite a flesh-and-blood story.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-029-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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