Academics writing about Foote’s life and work will have to slog through these unselective, self-indulgent memoirs; other,...
A wearisomely folksy account of a young actor’s apprenticeship in the 1930s.
Renowned playwright Foote takes up where Farewell (1999) left off, with his Depression-era departure from his hometown of Wharton, Texas, for a now-defunct acting school in Pasadena, California. He arrived in Pasadena a polite young rube and, judging by the aw-shucks narrative voice, left a polite young rube who could act. Considering that Dorothy Parker was then in her acerbic prime, it’s astounding that he could manage—particularly given a life in the theater—to have remained so untouched by irony or worldliness. Foote’s naïveté is initially endearing but eventually cloying. Given his distinguished career in the theater and the movies, he obviously has a fine and discriminating mind. Yet the performer who emerges in these pages shows no promise whatsoever. Nor does the more retrospective author allow himself any discriminating comments about the productions he watched or took part in, the theatrical training he enjoyed, or his own emotional development, if indeed it ever occurred. When he confides that Pauline Lord’s performance in Ethan Frome was the “most moving” that he ever saw, he never describes what so impressed him, but simply excerpts the New Republic’s review of the show. Meanwhile, Foote adds enough descriptions of friends and events presumably of great interest to the author (an entire chapter is devoted to his appendectomy) to make him a double for your most rambling uncle—for example, when he repeats nearly verbatim the story of a friend’s announcement that she is off to Germany only seven pages after already having mentioned it. The memoir cries out for a ruthless editor to help the octogenarian author give shape and meaning to his narrative.
Academics writing about Foote’s life and work will have to slog through these unselective, self-indulgent memoirs; other, luckier souls can just say no.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1115-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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