A maverick's life, told with grace and good humor. Caldicott (Missile Envy, 1984), famed as an antinuclear activist and as a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility but less well known as an early researcher of cystic fibrosis, has much to tell. Born Helen Broinowski (``Nobody with Polish and Irish ancestry—as I have—has any right to expect a quiet, easy life'') into a family of Australian social progressives, she was one of the first female medical doctors to practice in her native country. She was also, early on, an outspoken critic and pacifist: ``I have taken on the establishment in society,'' she writes. ``I tend to have independent views which are often not popular initially, and I am impelled to speak the truth with little regard for the prevailing norms of society.'' That much is evident in her narrative of her early days as an activist, when she gave talks to Australian ladies' clubs and delivered the feminist gospel according to Germaine Greer—along with frank reminders that venereal disease is a possible outcome of sexual intimacy. Such remarks shocked her staid listeners. In later years, she has crusaded more widely for women's causes, for socialized medicine, for gun control (``the United States . . . is full of strange people carrying guns''), and, of course, for disarmament and the abolition of nuclear testing. One of the highlights of her book is an aside on how she bluffed Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, playing each off against the other, into endorsing her call for arms talks. Closely concerned with the big issues of our time, Caldicott does not often share the quotidian details of her own life, but when she does, it is with emotional power, as when she writes affectingly of the dissolution of her long marriage, and of her love for the natural world. A treat for Caldicott's many admirers. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03947-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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