Amusing but punch-less.
A raucous memoir of odd jobs and unhappiness by an author who is more drifter than working stiff.
Willing to up-end his life for a shot at earning a few bucks, Levison finds himself by turns a trucker trainee, a fish cutter, an oil deliveryman, and a film-set gopher. He encounters each job at once dutifully and passively, accepting the need for work and working willingly enough, yet never staying with anything beyond three months. This, Levison claims, is a result of having majored in English, which has no practical application. Thus every job is either one he “can’t get” or “doesn’t want”; rather than stay with one thing he doesn’t like, Levison varies the experience. When a job at a high-end food market grows old, he pirates cable professionally. Later, he works for weeks packing crabmeat on a rusty Alaskan tanker. Like David Sedaris in Naked, Levison is able to show each job as both funny and pathetic. Perhaps the best moment comes when he bungles a delivery of home-heating oil. Holding instructions that read “Fill at the donkey’s nose,” he assumes that a statue of a donkey in the front yard is, in fact, the receptacle and stuffs the oil gun up one of its nostrils. The donkey explodes from pressure. He later finds the intended oil tank beside the donkey and realizes, as he explains to his boss, that “fill” is a noun as well as a verb. Unlike Sedaris, however, Levison offers the reader no narrative arc. In addition, “manifesto” is a misnomer for something that asserts no beliefs and recommends no course of action. Levison is a nihilist who can only complain. Though he has yet to find a job he likes, he is accepting of careerists, seems to support capitalism, and other than wishing he hadn’t wasted his money on college, harbors few regrets.
Amusing but punch-less.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-280-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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