Anyone who has ever had a family or a computer can relate to Goodell’s story.
Techie journalist Goodell (The Cyberthief and the Samurai, not reviewed) presents a touching family portrait as well as an acute look at the social implications of the information age.
Goodell’s story (named for his bright California hometown) opens in 1979, when, after 21 years of marriage, Goodell’s mother tells her children that she and their father are getting divorced. This was no crisis to Goodell, who recalls thinking that “divorce felt more like a step into the modern world than the breaking of a sacred covenant.” But the split proves to be the first of many dark clouds in his family’s future, and Goodell is much more of a family guy than this initial reaction suggests. He documents and tries to reason with the slow breakdown of a family he loves dearly—a grandfather who valued engineering over family, a father destroyed by divorce, a mother who learns computer code and remarries, a brother ravaged by drugs and alcohol, and a sister struggling amidst the confusion. Goodell also speaks sincerely of his own rebellions, passions, and adventures—and of his love-hate relationship with technology. He races bikes, works a short stint at a company known by the “funny name” of Apple Computer, leaves home to work in a Lake Tahoe casino, discovers love and journalism, and continually worries about his family. Founded on family history and set in the accelerating world of Silicon Valley, Goodell’s story is linked meaningfully to the past and the future in his attempt to explain addiction, disease, desire, jealousy, and regret by finding “the faulty line of code that causes the whole system to crash.” And, in trying (unsuccessfully) to explain it all through scientific logic, he proves that love is not a quantifiable entity.
Anyone who has ever had a family or a computer can relate to Goodell’s story.Pub Date: July 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45698-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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