paper 0-8101-1604-9 A Croatian writer intriguingly probes the meaning of the past and its literary rendering through an examination of her own life and that of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Vrkljan’s two works form a cohesive whole that stirs the reader with the heavy atmosphere of Belgrade, Zagreb, and Berlin. The two works also invite us to draw parallels between what Vrkljan has to say about autobiographical writing and our own country’s obsession with memoir literature. The two works contain both the literary representation of the past and the interpretation of what it means to truthfully present the (remembered) facts of one’s life while retaining the lyrical beauty of words. The Silk, the Shears recounts Vrkljan’s life as it spans the tumultuous political upheavals of the century—from her childhood in interwar Belgrade, to her adolescence in Zagreb, and her adult life as a writer in Zagreb and Berlin. For those familiar with the former Yugoslavia, Vrkljan’s writing is piercing, vividly capturing the feel of strained intimate personal relations and public life. Vrkljan writes with honesty and tenderness about her family and friends, about her development as a poet, her own and her mother’s unsatisfactory role as wife, her oppressive father, and the troubles of women in society. Marina picks up on these themes; it reads as an externalized autobiography, an imaginative leap of interpretation through a literary and spiritual soul mate. Reflecting on this connection, Vrkljan writes, “The biographies of others. Splinters in our body. As I pull them out, I pull out my own pictures from the deep, dark funnel.” With the spirit of Tsvetaeva, Vrkljan discusses how a poet can reconstruct the fabric of life. A noteworthy addition to the small body of contemporary Croatian writings available in English, and a lyrical study of the form and meaning of biography.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8101-1603-0
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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