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HENRY DARGER, THROW-AWAY BOY

Name: HENRY DARGER, THROW-AWAY BOY
Author: Jim Elledge
ISBN: 978-1-59020-855-7

THE TRAGIC LIFE OF AN OUTSIDER ARTIST

by Jim Elledge ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2013

The author’s sociocultural agenda distorts a deeper understanding of the artist’s oeuvre.

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Queer culture historian Elledge (Professional Writing Program/Kennesaw St. Univ.; H: Poems, 2012, etc.) provides a startling new perspective on a famous outsider artist.

A reclusive dishwasher who spent his spare time writing sprawling novels and illustrating them with vivid drawings and collages, Henry Darger (1892–1973) has inspired equal amounts of praise, derision and horror. His epic work, In the Realms of the Unreal, depicts the adventures of the Vivian Girls, a group of child warriors who retaliates against the barbaric generals who torture, rape and kill innocent children. The graphic nature of the illustrations, along with the fact that the girls often appear naked and have male genitalia, has alternately fascinated and repulsed viewers. Some historians have accused Darger of pedophilia, and others have even suggested that his obsession with the disappearance and murder of a local girl indicate that he may have killed her (her murder was never solved). Elledge takes umbrage at these accusations and makes a case for Darger as a man who had himself been the victim of sexual abuse, both in the seedy Chicago neighborhood where he grew up and in the various institutions where he lived as an adolescent after his alcoholic father abandoned him. Elledge also claims that Darger’s decadeslong relationship with William Schloeder was a romantic one, citing Darger’s own oblique journal entries as well as research on gay culture in Chicago during the early 20th century. While Elledge has clearly conducted an impressive amount of research on Darger’s milieu, the artist’s own unwillingness to specify what actually happened to him during his years of institutionalization make the author’s assertions speculative at best. He also fails to place Darger within the context of other 20th-century self-taught artists until the last few pages of the book, and he barely covers Darger’s striking use of color and composition.

The author’s sociocultural agenda distorts a deeper understanding of the artist’s oeuvre.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-59020-855-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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.

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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

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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...

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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)