A charming, if unfocused, memoir that offers readable reflections from start to finish.
A 96-year-old Canadian physicist and entrepreneur looks back on his long life in this debut memoir.
Burgener gives a thorough accounting of his life, from his birth in 1917 through his childhood, education, later family life and extensive career in the physical sciences. His main career focus was spectrographic sampling and analysis, and although he writes mostly about the workings and growing complexity of the spectrography business, he also takes the time to briefly describe the science behind his life’s work. Throughout, he sketches in important historical events, including both world wars, the Cold War and the 1945 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and their effect on his life and career. Burgener has a sharp mind, and his writing style and voice reflect the straightforward, rational approach he describes in his work. His sentences are clear and unadorned, if a touch lengthy at times (as in the book’s subtitle, “107 Years of Interesting Anecdotes in the Life of a Canadian Physicist Who Changed the World with Spectroscopy and Analytical Chemistry”). As a result, his prose is easy to absorb. More to the point, Burgener’s life is truly fascinating, filled with relevant work, travel all over the world and a family life that was clearly fulfilling. The picture that emerges is of a man who’s humble and grateful for the life he’s led. His story is so wide-ranging, however, that it lacks focus; it feels more like a compilation of memories than a unified narrative, and some readers may wish that the memoir had a more coherent framework. Most others, however, will simply enjoy Burgener’s clear thinking and grateful appreciation.
A charming, if unfocused, memoir that offers readable reflections from start to finish.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1460206324
Page Count: 272
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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