bookshelf

AMERICAN TRAVELER

Name: AMERICAN TRAVELER
Author: James Zug
ISBN: 0-465-09405-8

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOHN LEDYARD, THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF WALKING THE WORLD

by James Zug ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005

Your average bear has never heard of Ledyard, true enough, but this brisk biography should catch the...

bookshelf

A fast-paced account of America’s first great explorer.

John Ledyard was born in 1751 Connecticut, died in Cairo, and traveled almost everywhere else imaginable in the intervening 37 years. The heart of journalist Zug’s bio details Ledyard’s travels, of course, but the author is to be commended for paying scrupulous attention to Ledyard’s early life as well. In the opening chapter, on Ledyard’s childhood, Zug (Squash, 2003, etc.) manages to give a real flavor of colonial life: in just nine pages, we get religion, children’s games, family networks, and romance. Chapter two, chronicling Ledyard’s brief stint at Dartmouth, begins to suggest Ledyard’s temperament. In college, Ledyard read Virgil, directed a play, and went backpacking on what would one day be the Appalachian Trail. But the highlight of his academic career was his exit—after only one year, Ledyard simply took off, running the Connecticut River in a canoe and winding up back at his grandfather’s farm in Hartford. At loose ends, the young man decided to travel—“I allot myself a seven year’s ramble more,” he wrote to a cousin. This “ramble” turned out to be more than postcollege aimlessness; it was a vocation. Zug chronicles the travels, which took Ledyard to the Sandwich Islands with Captain Cook and along the Alaskan coast to look for the Northwest Passage. He spent time in Lapland, St. Petersburg, and Paris, where he was virtually adopted by Thomas Jefferson. The character that emerges is a complicated one: Ledyard was sometimes manic and sometimes overwhelmed by despair; he was a rough explorer, but he loved clothes (in all his letters, he described his wardrobe before saying anything about his itinerary or adventures). He was courageous and sociable, but a loner. And he wanted to be famous. Thanks to Zug’s fascinating re-creation of his adventuring, Ledyard is well on his way.

Your average bear has never heard of Ledyard, true enough, but this brisk biography should catch the Early-America-Founding-Fathers craze.

Pub Date: April 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-465-09405-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005

Categories:

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)