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Name: [SIC]
Author: Joshua Cody
ISBN: 978-0-393-08106-0

by Joshua Cody ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2011

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Occasionally overwritten but powerfully provocative memoir about death and drugs that is likely to attract a lot of attention.

A gifted young composer who insists that he’s “not really a writer” Cody was diagnosed with a malignant cancer that required a bone marrow transplant following six months of chemotherapy (“you’ll go through it too, almost certainly,” he writes of the chemo. “It’s part of life in the twenty-first century”). With medical expectation suggesting that he would not survive, he became involved with a series of women—romantically or sexually, often drug-fueled—in a narrative that would be deemed implausible were this fiction. The strangest woman who has the strongest hold on him also happened to be the doctor through his bone marrow transplant, an “emotionally unstable” partner who ended their relationship rather than face his death. Yet, as the author admits, “the morphine acted as the classic unreliable narrator,” as dreams and the drugs that induced them pervade the narrative, occasionally leaving readers to ponder the distinction between real life and the reality of what the author experienced in his mind. There are also extended analyses of the relationship between art and life—he’s as absorbed with Paul Klee and Ezra Pound as he is with the Rolling Stones and David Foster Wallace—and attempts to render aesthetics as algebraic equations. Some of the writing is maddeningly glib: “Times change, as Cole Porter and Eliot and the Byrds and those guys who wrote the Bible knew so well.” Some shows flashes of deep insight: “What else, after all, is creativity, if not self-permission to get something wrong, in order to subsequently reorder that something to get it right.” Ultimately, reader frustration will resolve amid the wild swings of mind and mood that the narrative captures, as the diversions of the Manhattan club circuit provide small distraction from the hard truths of mortality. A celebration of the senses, the arts and life itself, within what the author terms “a story about God and vomiting.”

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-393-08106-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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)