by Joel Golby ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019
Yes, there are some flashes of brilliance; hopefully Golby will continue to grow as a writer.
A debut essay collection from a young, London-based staff writer for Vice.
The volume opens with a bang: “Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead” shows a writer who can be funny and offhandedly profound at the same time, as he discovers “there is something about death that brings out the weird little crevices in all of us.” He continues, “instances of grief, I have found, are unique, two never coming in the same shape, and they can be piercing and hard-edged or they can be like passing through a deep dark treacle or they can be like a long, slow-passing cloud; it can make everything gray or everything sharp; it can hit you like a truck or it can hit you like cholesterol.” Unfortunately, putting the longest and best essay at the beginning sets expectations higher than the rest can deliver. After dealing with mortality and home and grief, Golby writes about whether he’s the type of man who should grow a mustache or wear a leather jacket, the challenges and symbolic significance of autofellatio, the mad obsession over winning at Monopoly, and the fantasy sex lives of the characters in the M&M commercials. “[I am] thirty now,” he writes, “and this is a difficult thing to be. Internally, I fundamentally still feel like I am a lost child still slightly bewildered to have pubic hair. Externally, the world expects me to work a job and pay bills and know what politics is. And somewhere in between those spaces, there is a dissonance.” In his attempts to come to terms with that dissonance, he sometimes feels like a kindred spirit to David Sedaris, but younger and more biting. He knows what material hits the deepest (family, home, death), and he occasionally recycles insights from the stronger pieces into less substantial ones. The last essay, “Running Alongside the Wagon,” about his father’s alcoholism and perhaps his own, is almost as good as the first.
Yes, there are some flashes of brilliance; hopefully Golby will continue to grow as a writer.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56277-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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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