A hazily rendered autobiography of the popular 1970s folk singer. Denver was born Henry John Deutschendorf, the self-conscious, withdrawn son of an uptight Air Force pilot; at 50, the singer says, he's still struggling to reach adulthood. With the help of oral historian Tobier, he describes youthful alienation in Montgomery, Ala., and Fort Worth, Tex.; early successes on the L.A. folk music scene and as the composer of ``Leaving on a Jet Plane'' for Peter, Paul, and Mary; and his peripatetic late '60s life as a singer of satirical antiwar songs with the Chad Mitchell Trio. Despite these counterculture credentials, Denver acknowledges that he's rather square—of Mick Jagger's appeal he says, ``Frankly, I just didn't get it.'' That and a certain shyness, along with a string of hits through the mid-'70s, helped make him palatable to enormous numbers of Americans and, later, the unthreatening embodiment of a progressive environmental stance. Denver's attempt to ``define his space'' has drawn him to various New Age phenomena, including Werner Erhard's EST, astrology, and Native American soul retrieval. He has sought to make constructive use of his popularity and wealth, as a member of Jimmy Carter's Commission on World Hunger and founder of Windstar, a Colorado environmental institute. Flashes of self-awareness (``Being `cute' onstage was my way of covering up a fear...of being seen as vacuous'') and clichÇs appear in equal proportion here. Despite confessions of drug use, extramarital affairs, and an angry incident with a chainsaw, the sort of detail that would lend drama to such scenes is generally lacking. Fans may get greatest satisfaction from descriptions of the circumstances that inspired hits like ``Take Me Home, Country Roads'' and ``Rocky Mountain High.'' This may resonate with Denver's still-sizable following but few others. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59537-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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