bookshelf

MOTHER COUNTRY

Name: MOTHER COUNTRY
Author: Jeremy Harding
ISBN: 978-1-84467-657-6

MEMOIR OF AN ADOPTED BOY

by Jeremy Harding ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2010

As a child, the author lived along the waters of the Thames with the family that took him when he was less than two weeks...

bookshelf

London Review of Books contributing editor Harding (The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man’s Gate, 2000, etc.) seeks his birth mother after 50 years.

As a child, the author lived along the waters of the Thames with the family that took him when he was less than two weeks old. At the age of five, Harding was informed that he was adopted and that his natural parents were a young Irish maiden and a Scandinavian sailor, not his capricious, tippling mother and his cocky, bridge-card hustler father. As an adult, he searched for his parents, scouring birth records, voting registrations and death reports and interviewing old neighbors with faulty memories. Harding compiled a dossier, a burgeoning portfolio of known and implied facts about the Hibernian girl who bore him half a century earlier. The author knew a few hard facts: She arrived in England after the war, lived at 43 Mackenzie Close and worked at a chain store. But who was she? What was she like? Was there a physical resemblance? Did he have brothers or sisters? Plotted craftily, his journal of discovery unfolds memorably, and his detective work, sometimes desultory, often assiduous, was finally productive. Along the way, Harding also uncovered the saga of his adoptive mother’s rise to a better class of society. As a proper memoirist must do, he invests the narrative of his familiar parents with unique character in his story of natural and acquired parentage. A fitting denouement, as well as a new introduction for American readers, is provided. “I’ve tried to tell a story: this is not a campaigning book,” he writes. “Nevertheless, it’s a powerful illustration of what can happen when an adopted person, whose birth certificate shows only the names of the adoptive parents, exercises a legal right to see the original birth certificate.”

Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-84467-657-6

Page Count: 212

Publisher: Verso

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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)