by Jan de Hartog ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 2007
A diminutive masterpiece.
Posthumous love letter to the author’s mother.
Prolific Dutch-born novelist de Hartog (The Outer Buoy: A Story of the Ultimate Voyage, 1994, etc.), who died in 2002, tells the story of a quiet, self-effacingly heroic woman in prose to match. (He never even tells us his mother’s name.) She was in her early 20s when she met and married Arnold de Hartog, a Protestant pastor and theologian two decades her senior who is still remembered for his anti-Nazi agitation and a speech he made in support of the Jews just before the outbreak of World War II. When he died in 1938, two years before the Nazi invasion of Holland, the family was thrown into chaos. Jan’s mother was visiting his older brother in the Dutch East Indies, which was soon captured by the Japanese. It was in an internment camp that the woman who had always seemed to exist to support her fiery husband finally came into her own, displaying a steely strength her sons had never suspected. While imprisoned, she not only provided spiritual succor to her fellow detainees, occasionally in the form of eerily prescient palm readings that earned her the nickname “mischievous saint,” but also brokered a cease-fire between the Dutch army and Indonesian guerrilla fighters who allowed a convoy of sick female prisoners to be carried through the jungle to a Red Cross station. De Hartog heard these stories from others; he only truly began to know his mother for himself 20 years later, when she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. As he despaired, her modest bravery and steadfast faith again sustained him. The book is remarkable not just for its exceptional subject, but also for its portrait of the unsettling process by which an adult child comes at last to know a parent.
A diminutive masterpiece.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42470-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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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...
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
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