An uncritical but colorful picture of a offbeat character who convinced many that he was a genius.
Stage-magic historian Steinmeyer (Art and Artifice: And Other Essays of Illusion, 2006, etc.) examines the quirky life of Charles Fort (1874–1932).
Fort’s books, writes Steinmeyer, are filled with “data that Science has excluded,” and laid the groundwork for modern science fiction as well as belief in the paranormal, alien abductions and other quasi-supernatural phenomena. Fort grew up in Albany, left an abusive home early and nearly starved in New York City before discovering a talent for fiction. Between 1900 and 1920 he wrote short stories to scrape by, attracting enthusiastic support from Theodore Dreiser (then better known as a magazine editor than a novelist). Despite Dreiser’s influence, Fort remained on the edge of poverty, and his only novel flopped. Always fascinated by weird events, he began spending days at the public library, poring through books and journals. In 1919 Dreiser persuaded his publisher to bring out Fort’s first collection of oddities, The Book of the Damned; it turned out to be mildly successful, and three more followed. All listed myriad marvels: blood or frogs raining from the sky, ghosts, UFOs, talking animals, telepathy, etc. Fort was no skeptic; if someone witnessed a corpse return to life, he wrote it down. He had no overall philosophy except to ridicule the authority of science and, more occasionally, religion. Since scientists quarreled, disagreed and were sometimes wrong, he assumed that one theory was as good as another, and paranormal events as likely as any others. Clearly an admirer, Steinmeyer avers that Fort’s writing foreshadowed a respectable philosophical school that asserts that all truth is relative. The biographer shows little interest in pointing out that Fort’s implausible anecdotes remain implausible today, or that his disbelief in such scientific triumphs as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics hasn’t held up.
An uncritical but colorful picture of a offbeat character who convinced many that he was a genius.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58542-640-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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