by Helene Stapinski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2001
Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s filmed melodramas, Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls...
A humorous yet unsettling look back at a minor-league grifter family in a major-league crooked town—pre-reform Jersey City.
Stapinski’s debut invokes sensitive questions about class, domesticity, and the tolerance of corruption essential to machine politics. She artfully reconstructs her hardscrabble 1970s childhood above a tavern, and her close-knit, rambunctious family, entangled by the graft-ridden Hudson County government (her mother worked for the DMV, and an aunt was a longtime “fixer”). But to a large degree she portrays her family, like her native city, as cursed—and she explores veins of darkness behind the hearty façade: the community’s reliance on stolen goods (and the endorsement of criminality that implied), her taciturn father’s dependence on alcohol, and the violence embodied by a hate-filled grandfather (whose madness was tolerated in the community until he tried to murder members of his own family). Throughout, Stapinski uses her family-based narrative to portray an urban political culture that encouraged theft, election fraud, industrial pollution, and a looting of the tax base, while pacifying underclass residents with city-payroll jobs and mob-mentality hedonism. Along the way, she constructs a vivid picture of pre-gentrification Jersey City: a “scary” place where teenagers attended decaying movie palaces, the streets were full of deformed pencil-sellers and midget news-dealers, stolen goods were sold in the municipal buildings, and loose joints and “the numbers” were available on any street corner. Although evoking the crowded, colloquial feel of “outsider” writing, the author has a fine sense of narrative line and of relevant observation; as a result, her work simultaneously captures the street-level conviviality of the urban working class, and the desperation and violence lurking beneath.
Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s filmed melodramas, Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls (1999), this is an unusual and relevant urban family history.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46306-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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
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