Apportioning just the right attention to each of their stories, Blum weaves a truly memorable frontier tale.
An accomplished storyteller and two-time Pulitzer nominee charts the criss-crossed lives of three remarkable Klondike characters.
By 1898, George Carmack, the prospector who first discovered gold at Bonanza Creek and set off the Yukon gold rush, was looking for a way to transport a quarter-million dollars’ worth of ore from his claim to the stronghold of a boat headed for Seattle; Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, the underworld king of the Skagway, Alaska, boomtown planned on stealing the treasure; Charlie Siringo, an intrepid Pinkerton detective, owed an unusual debt to Carmack and sought to repay it by helping to foil the robbery. By now, fans of Vanity Fair contributing editor Blum (American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, 2008, etc.) are familiar with his narrative formula: Take a few colorful characters, each a book-worthy subject in his own right and build a story that culminates in their mutual encounter. If the final collision here of the three principals comes as a bit of a letdown, it’s only because following the seemingly predestined paths of each to their Skagway wharf confrontation has been so wildly compelling. A California sheepherder who always dreamed of finding gold, Carmack joined the Marines, learned the Tlingit language and ways, deserted and then returned to Alaska intent on prospecting and fulfilling his mystical destiny. The garrulous Siringo, former shopkeeper and cowboy, signed on with the Pinkertons for adventure and, mourning the death of his wife, went undercover in Juneau to solve the Treadwell mine heist. An outrageous con man, Soapy and his scamming gang had taken over and been run out of a series of Western towns before landing in Skagway. The tumult of the times tosses these three hardened men together—two fleeing warrants, all driven by private demons and outsized dreams—against the backdrop of the last great stampede for gold.
Apportioning just the right attention to each of their stories, Blum weaves a truly memorable frontier tale.Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46172-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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