John’s honesty is bracing as he tries hard for understanding and acceptance, but the Hemingway legacy remains as complicated...
Desperately sad memoir by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson chronicles a wretched family history of turbulent father-son relationships exacerbated by chronic, hereditary mental illness.
The author’s father, Gregory Hemingway, was Ernest’s son by second wife Pauline. Ignored and abandoned as a boy by his glamorous parents, Greg grew up hating his mother and idealizing his famous father. He was afflicted with the same bipolar disorder that led Papa and grandfather Clarence to commit suicide in late middle age. Moreover, Greg was a transvestite, frequently arrested for cross-dressing; he eventually underwent a sex-change operation. Born in 1960, the author also had to deal with a schizophrenic mother who was often hospitalized, leaving him and his siblings to be shifted among relatives. John writes in a surprisingly evenhanded fashion about these traumatic events, as well as Greg’s mental degeneration as he moved from one wife/caretaker to another, much as Ernest did. The author reproduced family patterns, too: Financially dependent on his father’s handouts, he wheedled to get what he wanted, just as Greg did with Ernest. “I would like to see you straighten up and fly right,” Ernest exhorts his son in one of the explosive letters printed here to trace their fraught bond. Greg was deeply ambivalent about his identity, and John argues that perhaps Ernest was as well. He enlists Papa’s work to back him up, and to cast a more forgiving light on Greg’s troubled behavior. He couldn’t be a writer, he realized, until he made peace with his father. In the book’s moving afterword, the author promises to his own newborn son that “this time it’d be different.”
John’s honesty is bracing as he tries hard for understanding and acceptance, but the Hemingway legacy remains as complicated as ever.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59921-112-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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