A compelling story of small-town boxing in Alaska and a complex examination of masculine identities.
Adrift in Alaska, a young man confronts his past and seeks direction by competing in a barroom boxing show in Juneau.
In his second memoir, Coffin (Creative Writing/Univ. of New Hampshire; A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, 2008) interrogates his close but conflicted bond with his father and his mythical ideals of masculinity. The author was a year out of college when he impulsively embarked on a solo kayaking journey from the San Juan Islands in Washington to Sitka, Alaska. There, he landed a job tutoring at a local high school. One evening, he met and sparred with Victor, a local boxing legend and coach. As Victor recognized the author’s innate toughness, he encouraged him to enlist in a boxing event called Roughhouse Friday. Through these physically demanding, adrenaline-soaked matches, under Victor’s expanding influence, Coffin began to unleash a long-suppressed rage, mainly directed toward his father but also against the subtle bigotry he experienced as the child of a white American father and a Thai mother. His father, a military psychologist, left his mother and their two children in Maine while Coffin was still a young boy and started a new family. The author’s anger toward his father, though intently explored, feels somewhat unprocessed; there’s a raw nerve left under the surface that the author may address in future writing. The strength of the narrative derives from Coffin’s vivid and perceptive accounts of the boxing matches and the participants, each with varying boxing abilities and their own individual scores to settle. “Even the most raw, unskilled bouts,” writes the author, “when watched with any empathy at all for the people in them, reveal a tender story about each fighter: what they are made of, who they are, what sadness they carry, what joy….I sometimes found myself leaving the ring feeling numb and dull while, on other occasions, I went back to my corner on the verge of confused tears.”
A compelling story of small-town boxing in Alaska and a complex examination of masculine identities.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-25195-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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