A golden-hued, folksy account of a generous farming community.
Anecdotes and history of an East Texas town, with a corncob-pipe theme.
Nostalgia and old-fashioned community spirit rule in the series of anecdotes about the lives and times of the 150 farming and small-business people who lived in Fairdale, Texas. Its lifespan was little more than a century before it disappeared under the waters of the Toledo Bend Reservoir in the 1960s. Oglesbee (San Augustine County, 2010) portrays the town’s social, economic and daily life during the early 20th century, based on reminiscences of residents and their descendants. It was hard going splitting wood, plowing by mule, nurturing crops threatened by the vagaries of nature, tending cattle and worrying about feeding a large family. An iron will, a belief in God and a cheerful community spirit seemed to pull everyone through. Livestock and domestic animals were almost part of the family. Bossy, one family’s cow, had the habit of munching on wild onions and bitter weeds, which made her milk undrinkable. Old Devil, a mule, possessed a cantankerous spirit but reliably pulled the plow and did the heavy lifting around the farm. Snip and Goode, two faithful dogs, showed astonishing instinct in looking after a herd of cows one night when a farmer was too ill to move. Children grew up surrounded by nature, amusing and enjoying themselves, without any of the luxuries available to big-city families. Fairdale’s claim to lasting fame is a possible/probable link with Aaron Burr, the U.S. vice president under Thomas Jefferson. Oglesbee researched the link meticulously (many of the town’s inhabitants were named Burr). A question that arises in the mind of the cynical reader is whether all the folk in the town were so openhearted and full of good spirit. Not a breath of scandal touches the chronicle. “No one knows where this place is but God and us,” is the comment of one former citizen. That is about the best epitaph any small town can have.
A golden-hued, folksy account of a generous farming community.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484033272
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
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