The author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, etc., is portrayed here as homosexual, voyeur, masochist, scientist, and social revolutionary. The first so-called Kinsey Report (1948) blasted Victorian morality by presenting statistical analyses of searching face-to- face interviews with thousands of American men who revealed sexual behavior that was shocking and liberating at the same time. Most men said they masturbated; many had premarital and extramarital sex; many had homoerotic experiences; and a small percentage had sex with animals. If that information—and the much milder revelations in the 1953 Kinsey Report on women—seems old hat now, it created a furor at the time that led all the way from American church pulpits to Congress (where, as recently as 1995, a bill was introduced calling for an investigation of Kinsey's influence on sex education). Beginning with Kinsey's guilt-ridden childhood in New Jersey and an unhappy relationship with an authoritarian father, Jones (History/Univ. of Houston; Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, 1981) describes the scientist's life in the kind of microscopic detail that would have pleased the man who began his career as an entomologist. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard, Kinsey settled on the faculty of Indiana University. His interest shifted from insects to human sexual behavior because, he said, of his students' questions. Supported for many years by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, he collected countless sexual histories, including those of homosexuals, pedophiles, prisoners, and prostitutes. Citing many anonymous sources, the author also reports that Kinsey privately practiced what he preached about sexual liberation: increasingly painful masochistic techniques, homosexual encounters, and later, with the staff of the Kinsey Institute, wife- and husband-swapping (episodes that were frequently filmed in the attic of Kinsey's home). An exhaustive, compelling portrait of a scientist hailed as both a ``genius'' and a ``dirty old man.''
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04086-0
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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