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A DARING YOUNG MAN

A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM SAROYAN

Overall, a persuasive argument for reassessing the career of a neglected American writer.

Novelist Leggett, a former director of Iowa’s Workshop, makes a convincing case that Saroyan was more complex and interesting, both as man and as artist, than his current reputation suggests.

When Saroyan died, in 1981, his literary reputation had been on the wane for years. Today, if he’s remembered at all, it’s most likely as the writer of sentimental tales of “little people” suffering through adversity and emerging with their faith in humanity intact. But, as Leggett makes clear, Saroyan was driven as much by anger as by sentiment. Born in Fresno, California, in 1903, the son of Armenian immigrants, he spent five years in an orphanage after his father died and his mother wasn’t able to support him. The memory of these early hardships, combined with the prejudice over his ancestry he was later to encounter in school, instilled in him a lifelong hatred of social injustice, but also a sense of self-reliance that often manifested itself as arrogance and a refusal to listen to anyone’s advice but his own. His early success only cemented his intransigence: he published a bestselling story collection at the age of 26 and a decade later had three plays running on Broadway simultaneously, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Time of Your Life. Later, he won an Academy Award for his screenplay The Human Comedy (which he later adapted into a novel). Unfortunately, these early achievements were soon erased by his own self-destructive behavior. He married and divorced the same woman twice, gambled compulsively, and quarreled with editors, publishers, producers, other writers, and his own children. Leggett’s portrait is sympathetic without being sentimental, and he has a novelist's eye for the telling detail. A more thorough discussion of Saroyan’s actual work would have been appreciated, however, as Leggett assumes a familiarity with it that many readers won’t necessarily have.

Overall, a persuasive argument for reassessing the career of a neglected American writer.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002

ISBN: 0-375-41301-4

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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