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LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY

Name: LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY
Author: Jr. Morris
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9866-4

HOW SAMUEL CLEMENS BECAME MARK TWAIN

by Jr. Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 13, 2010

Nothing new or particularly compelling for Twain buffs, but an engaging account for the casual fan.

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This latest addition to the overstuffed Twain library offers neither scholarly revelation nor literary insight, but instead provides a Civil War historian’s account of the author’s formative years during and after the war.

The editor of Military Heritage magazine and author of books on the Civil War and other topics from that era (The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America, 2008, etc.) might seem like an odd choice to tackle a subject who did his best to avoid that war. Yet Morris builds a solid case that it was the war that “ended Twain’s career as a riverboat pilot, occasioned his brief inglorious career as a Confederate guerilla, and (had) driven him westward across the continent.” The central theme of the book, stated more than once, is that “he had come west as Sam Clemens…He was returning east as Mark Twain—increasingly renowned journalist, lecturer, and short story writer.” The challenge for the author is that the period from 1861 to 1867 has, like the rest of Twain’s life, been exhaustively documented. Morris’s narrative relies heavily on the many books that have come before, including Twain’s autobiographical writings. Since Twain was never known to let the facts get in the way of a good yarn—even his journalism was marked by stretching the truth and outright invention—Morris attempts to set the record straight. He does a good job detailing the young man’s years in Nevada as a shareholder in ultimately worthless mines, San Francisco as a Wild West outpost and Hawaii, where Twain went surfing(!). For the reader willing to forgive the assessment that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is “in some ways (his) best book,” the Twain who emerges here is more human, less legend.

Nothing new or particularly compelling for Twain buffs, but an engaging account for the casual fan.

Pub Date: April 13, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4165-9866-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010

Categories:

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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

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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)