A thorough if somewhat detached life of the dean of Western American letters. Best remembered as an environmentalist and historian, Stegner (19091993) was also an accomplished novelist who, Benson points out, had won ``nearly every major award given to a writer except the Nobel Prize'' but whose works generally sold only modestly. Benson (The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, 1983) charts the course of Stegner's development as a writer. He has little to say about his subject's early years except that they were marked by ``emotional isolation and feelings of deficiency and failure,'' but he warms up when dealing with the adult Stegner, armed with a doctorate and occupying influential positions at Harvard and, later, Stanford, where he founded the fellowships in creative writing that bear his name. (Among his students were Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Robert Stone.) Stegner documented his own life so well, in books like the semiautobiographical novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Wolf Willow, a blend of history and memoir, that Benson can sometimes add little to the portrait Stegner left us. But Benson, himself a professor of literature (San Diego State Univ.), has much to say about the content of Stegner's books and the manner of their composition. Benson stresses Stegner's preoccupation in his books with the development of personal identity, as well as his unusual, tightly woven narrative structures. There are also a few thought-provoking surprises, as when Benson points out that at the end of his life Stegner was so depressed about the rape of the West that he intended to move to Vermont, where, he maintained, there was more wild nature than in California. Admirers of Stegner's work will find this a useful but uninspired companion. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86222-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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