Tender, anecdotal glimpses of life in the far Canadian north at mid-20th century, from a prolific novelist (Running West, 1990, etc.) and artist. Houston headed to the land of the Inuit on a whim (he simply hopped a plane north) and a prayer. He was clueless as to Inuit language and custom, untutored as to surviving in the austere landscape, but thunderstruck by the beauty of the place. When he was given a couple of small Inuit stone carvings in exchange for portraits he had drawn, a light flickered on in his skull: He would become a dealer in Inuit artwork, selling carvings as well as prints (the Inuit had always been skilled carvers and began making prints in the 1950s), and thus earn his meal ticket to the Arctic- -and, not incidentally, earn a boodle for the artists at the same time. From 1948 to 1962 he traveled extensively throughout the territory, bartering for art while sampling and celebrating the Inuit way of life: dog-sledding, walrus hunting, navigating through a whiteout, the customary roll in the hay with his friend's wife, the architecture of the igloo, the beauties of a native kayak (``the early slanting sunlight made the kayak partly transparent, showing its inner ribs in a golden glow''). Framed in a series of quick, chatty vignettes, these tales of Houston's rambles and the life he builds in the far north are warm and avuncular, and they have the feel of performance art; you don't so much read the book as listen to it being told. There are moments when he strikes a discordantly quaint tone (when he fell in the water: ``It was nippy!''; the airplanes are primitive, with ``none of that newfangled stuff''), but for the most part, Houston's natural storytelling talents shine from the page. Sheer entertainment, as fascinating as it is charming. (40 line drawings)
Pub Date: April 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-78890-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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