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FIFTY YEARS OF BEGGING

Name: FIFTY YEARS OF BEGGING
Author: J. Calvitt Clarke
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5548-9

by J. Calvitt Clarke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2018

A biography that somewhat illuminates a multifaceted figure, although key questions remain unanswered.

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Clarke (History/Jacksonville Univ.; Alliance of Colored People, 2011) presents a biography of his grandfather Protestant fundraiser Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke.

The elder Clarke was born in 1887 in Brooklyn, New York. He enjoyed the amusements of Coney Island in his youth, dropped out of public school at age 14, and learned from working as an office boy “how the lack of money can be inconvenient.” He later attended various schools, worked on freighters in the Great Lakes, and eventually became an ordained minister. In this position, he revealed himself as someone who could both entertain and persuade. In 1914, he took to the pulpit at the Christian Church in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and his sermons drew praise in the Indiana Evening Gazette. In time, he would use his strength as an orator to help raise money for charitable causes, such as Armenians in peril during World War I. He later turned to fundraising full-time and founded a Christian organization devoted to helping children abroad. The book explores the elder Clarke’s fundraising in depth; however, the story is most intriguing when examining his “second life of great merit”: his vocation as a writer. He published a number of novels under pseudonyms—many of them racy romances, such as Tenement Girl and Boarding House Blonde. In a novel titled The Slaves of Ishtar, the author says, “Clarke married debauchery with mysticism and demonic human sacrifice.” The fact that a respected Christian fundraiser had a side job writing about “demonic human sacrifice” is an astounding revelation that makes this biography a worthwhile read. Indeed, further exploration of the novels would have been revealing and welcome. However, the author leaves things vague about how aware the elder Clarke’s colleagues were of his writings; it’s also not made clear how the fundraiser managed to write so prolifically while engaged in his other activities. The author adroitly describes his subject’s charity work, but it won’t strike readers’ imaginations the way that the unpublished futuristic novel Doctor Time does, with its assortment of utopian oddities.

A biography that somewhat illuminates a multifaceted figure, although key questions remain unanswered.

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5548-9

Page Count: 354

Publisher: Archway Publishing

Review Posted Online: March 24, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)