by John Lanchester ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 2007
A lovely story that gets bogged down in detail.
British novelist Lanchester (Fragrant Harbor, 2002, etc.) uncovers his mother’s secret life—nothing sordid, just surprising—and in the process comes to understand his own character.
“All families have secrets,” the author declares near the beginning of his uneven memoir. But it was not until after his parents’ deaths that he became more than vaguely aware of what his mother was hiding. He spent the next few years researching his parents’ lives and trying to understand in particular the demons that pursued his mother, Julia Gunnigan. Born in County Mayo to a large, impecunious Irish family, at age 16 (in 1937), she elected to enter a convent, as did several of her sisters. But Julia left convent life twice, the second time after she’d taken final vows. She tried nursing, teaching and writing under a pseudonym, then in London met Bill Lanchester, an attractive, intelligent international banker. (Born in South Africa, he had worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and other spots in Southeast Asia.) When they met in 1959, Bill was 33; Julia, nearing 40, took her sister’s name in order to delete nine years from her age. They married, and Julia spent the rest of her life lying about her past. The first two-thirds of the narrative presents the fruits of Lanchester’s research into his parents’ lives. Assuming that readers will find the minutiae of his mother’s life as compelling as he does, he reproduces pages of her dull letters from the convent, supplemented with his eye-glazing commentary. Once the author arrives on the scene, however, the pace quickens and interest intensifies. Lanchester writes affectingly of his relationships with his parents, of their painful deaths from heart conditions, of his struggles with debilitating panic attacks and his difficulties with writing.
A lovely story that gets bogged down in detail.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-399-15300-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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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