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BAUDELAIRE

Name: BAUDELAIRE
Author: Joanna Richardson
ISBN: 0-312-11476-1

THE LIFE OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

by Joanna Richardson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 28, 1994

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Another of Richardson's massively thorough, massively documented, but only minimally engaging biographies of French literary lights (Zola, 1978, etc.). Richardson sorts through conflicting testimonies about the notorious poet of Les Fleurs du mal: He was a voluptuary, he was a virgin; he indulged in drink, he drank moderately. In fact, according to the author, he was a man divided against himself, unable to resist carnal desires yet feeling degraded by them—a true Catholic at heart, despite his conviction in 1857 for offending public morality with his poems. But Richardson primarily hangs her view of Baudelaire on one thread: the unhealthy symbiosis between the poet and his mother, and the poet's conflicting needs, first, to avenge himself on her for remarrying and abandoning him emotionally when he was a boy; and, second, to recover the earlier, idyllic period of her widowhood, when he was the focus of her love. Quoting liberally from the poet's letters to his mother, Richardson limns a life as wearying to the reader as it must have been to the poet: the endless cajoling and castigating requests for money (youthful extravagance by the poet-dandy had led to the appointment of a trustee to dole out his inheritance), efforts to flee creditors, writings conceived but never executed. His devotion to the prostitute Jeanne Duval was thus a revenge against his conventional mother; his chaste love for the courtesan Apollonie Sabatier was an attempt to recover the lost maternal love. This is all credible but not very satisfying, for as Richardson herself shows, this man was highly complex: rebellious, sensitive, egotistical, self-doubting, cynical, naive. Yet while highlighting Baudelaire's misery, she fails to illuminate the means by which he, as he once put it, turned the mud of life into poetic gold. Fortunately she does rely heavily on quoting letters from the time, and thus presents a heartrending picture of Baudelaire's last year, before his death at the age of 46 in 1867: Struck by hemiplegia and aphasia, the poet who had made such exquisite use of language was virtually unable to utter a word. Strictly for students and devotees of this great poäte maudit.

Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1994

ISBN: 0-312-11476-1

Page Count: 624

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | 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)