Alaska: where the whites live out their dreams or go bonkers, and the Natives sport attachÉ cases or swig straight from the bottle. McGinniss (The Selling of the President, Heroes) set out in late November, when the people who rode the ferry from Seattle "were going to Alaska for a reason." Starting with his cabin-mate, he learns their reasons. "The high state official" found himself in Fairbanks in 1949, after a tearing drunk, with only $1.70 in his pocket: "There still was an American frontier, and he had happened to stumble across it." To him, the frontier vanished with the pipeline. And McGinniss' old friend, who left a Massachusetts newspaper job in 1967 "in search of freedom and adventure," is now Atlantic Richfield's resident director of public relations. But the passing of the "real Alaska" hasn't yet closed the door to freedom or opportunity: in shabby, dreary Bethel, a young Eskimo woman and her three San Francisco hippie friends quickly became the town's librarian, museum curator, disk jockey, press photographer: the cultural powers-that-be. "If you've got any talent at all," says one, "you can use it to an unlimited extent." Still, they too are worried, McGinniss finds, by the pace of development. He makes other sorties: to Barrow, where the Eskimos, newly enriched by the Native Claims Act, send their basketball team to Hawaii to compete (along with "a dozen cheerleaders and thirty or forty students to do the cheering") and the white superintendent of schools doesn't dare rebuke them; to a Russian Orthodox Christmas festival—a week-long orgy of candy-eating—in a squalid Eskimo village; and to more conventional Alaska sites—the oilfields, a cabin back of beyond, a Senate hearing on preservation of the wilderness. In a sense his unstructured, non-sequential narrative is like a quick-cut trailer for a film that never gets underway; but if we're denied commanding thoughts, we're also spared pat generalizations. Instead: "The way you could tell a real Alaskan," one of his contacts comments, "was by how many marriages he had survived." And at the close, when McGinniss has a double-barreled "wilderness adventure"—he's threatened by grizzlies and comes upon a hidden, Shangri-La valley—there's reason to be grateful for the looseness, the come-what-mayness of the rest of the book. The raw, tacky, raucous human scene, and the isolation and cold, are subject enough. Engrossing reading and an addition to the basic Alaska shelf.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1980
ISBN: 1935347039
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
