Though clearly for Old West buffs, this is an enjoyable excursion.
A rip-roaring history of moving the mail in the wildest of the Wild West days.
As fans of Westworld know, it was big money that made the buckboards bounce and the transcontinental railroad chug from coast to coast. One big-money engine was Wells Fargo, the banking concern founded in the gold rush era by two owners of the American Express company in New York who saw in California the possibility of riches in moving wealth—literally—for other people. Thus it is, writes lawyer and former police officer Boessenecker (Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, 2016, etc.), that “In the popular imagination, Wells Fargo is inextricably linked to stagecoaches.” Put a stagecoach or train driver and a shotgun together, stick a cash box onboard, and you’ll get robbers. The formula affords the author the opportunity to parade a catalog of good guys and bad guys across the story. Early on comes the admirable Wells Fargo pioneering rider Chips Hodgkins, who ran away from home, became an apprentice to a shipwright, and then moved to California to carry millions of dollars in gold over the course of a four-decade career. “He was so scrupulously honest,” writes Boessenecker, “that is was commonly said of him, ‘No man in the United States ever actually handled more money than he did, but not a nickel of it ever stuck to his fingers.’" Not so the likes of the desperado named “Rattle Jack,” who, shot to pieces in a robbery attempt, begged his fellow outlaws to kill him. They obliged, “and after tying a rope to his neck to make it look like he had been lynched, they tossed his body into the Russian River.” Also figuring in these pages are Wells Fargo lawmen like Jeff Milton, tough railroaders like Aaron Ross, and unsung bad guys like Ormus B. Nay. It’s a readable if old-fashioned exercise in criminal yarn spinning.
Though clearly for Old West buffs, this is an enjoyable excursion.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18488-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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