Merry confessions of a cheerful poet and filmmaker who's had his bouts with anxieties and ulcers but has come through all smiles. Broughton writes with disarming frankness about his 80 years as an artist and as a human being seeking wholeness. Much of his life was spent overcoming memories of a humorless, demanding mother who never grasped the nature of his free spirit. His parents- -shocked by his favorite diversion of dancing naked with a scarf to Victrola records and by a letter of his to a young lover that his mother opened before mailing—shipped him off to military school to make a man of him. There, Broughton found that he enjoyed the warmth and friendship of sleeping with young men—but not of the several boors who failed to seduce him. His life, he believes, has been guided by an angel, Hermy, three years his elder, who first appeared in full brilliance in his bedroom when the author was three and has reappeared many times since. It may be that Broughton became fixated by the freedom the angel offered, since he's lived the unchained life of a poet ever since—as the angel told him he would. Examples of Broughton's poetry in the text do not greatly convince about his poetic talent, although each poem has its unfetteredness. We follow him through the making of his 20-some avant-garde films, which also don't convince on the page, but then, he says, easterners don't grasp the lyric mode of the unbuttoned California filmmaker. Broughton's strongest pages tell of his long friendship with the ever more befuddled alcoholic guru Alan Watts, and of his marriage, at age 49, and two children. The marriage failed after several years, when the author became impotent, but Broughton's sexuality revived at age 65, when he bonded with a 16- year-old admirer with whom he then made a handful of farewell films. Straightforward, dry, charming. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87286-280-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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