by J.F. Powers edited by Katherine A. Powers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2013
Thoroughly disenchanting: Powers' admirers would do better to reread his stories or novels.
His daughter’s selection of correspondence reveals the American Catholic writer as immature, irresponsible and hard to live with.
Not that his wife and children got much time with J.F. Powers (1917–1999), who preferred solitude or the company of male friends to family life. He told his wife before they married that he wasn’t the domestic type and she should not look for him to maintain a steady income. Powers always avoided Thanksgiving and Christmas with his wife’s relatives, choosing instead to spend the holidays with old schoolmates or other friends. Many of these were priests, and Powers drew heavily upon their careers and experiences for his first novel, the 1963 National Book Award–winning Morte d’Urban, the story of a priest banished to the backwoods. Catholic writing flourished in the mid-20th century, and Powers contributed to the many magazines of the religious left and right. Nonetheless, he was constantly low on money and often took short-term teaching jobs that enabled him to relocate and leave his loved ones behind. At the same time, he was obsessed with the artist's relationship to his house and fixated on finding just the right place to live. The family moved constantly, three times to Ireland, and Powers insisted on his own space in each building. Even with that, he rented separate quarters so he would have a private place to work and write letters. His correspondence constantly references his work but mostly to say conditions were just too difficult for him to create. This volume would be more interesting if it included letters from others, particularly his long-suffering wife, but perhaps these would have only made it more distasteful by further exposing a character who comes across as completely self-absorbed and selfish.
Thoroughly disenchanting: Powers' admirers would do better to reread his stories or novels.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-26806-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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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