by Jens Andersen translated by Caroline Waight ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2018
Readers who grew up on Lindgren’s stories will find this excellent book irresistible—and often surprising.
Insightful, elegantly written biography of the beloved author of the Pippi Longstocking tales, a complex woman of parts.
“Life is not as rotten as it seems.” It’s not much of an affirmation, but, Danish biographer and literary critic Andersen (Hans Christian Andersen, 2005) suggests, it was about the best that Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) could do. Born into a family of farmers who instilled in her the virtues of hard work and a certain Nordic stoicism, Lindgren started off as a teenager fresh out of school working as a journalist—and quickly became pregnant by the mercurial editor, who, though “neither a journalist nor an author…could hear the difference between good and bad storytelling.” One wishes for Lindgren’s sake that he had been a better man, but the editor clearly knew that Lindgren had a gift. It was, Andersen writes, a gift laden with psychological insecurities. Without being too obvious about it, many of Lindgren’s stories were about loneliness, isolation, and depression, and while she reckoned, following a researcher’s findings, that Hans Christian Andersen wrote about death in “five-sixths” of his stories, she kept pace: “the same goes for my fairy-tales,” she said, “more or less.” Lindgren wrote in a range of genres, including books for grown-ups that included crime stories, comedies, and fables as well as her famed writings for young readers; many, as Andersen recounts, had a political edge as well as a psychological dimension, some specifically anti-Nazi. A fascinating aspect of the book is Andersen’s theory of the origins of the Pippi Longstocking stories in debates about childhood education, for while Lindgren wrote about the effects of loneliness on children, she also posited a world in which children could play freely, of a kind with and drawing on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, and, unexpectedly, the Superman comic book franchise.
Readers who grew up on Lindgren’s stories will find this excellent book irresistible—and often surprising.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-22610-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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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