A love story that just keeps on going.
A sassy dame who sounds tough—but at heart isn’t—tells her life story.
Or some part of it. Originally issued by a local publisher in New Orleans, where the action takes place, Conner’s debut ruefully recalls her marriage, divorce, and a brown dog the couple shared. She offers an assertive gumbo of anecdotes, memories, and recipes, seasoned with sharp opinions and held together by the pet. The Mississippi-born author tries, at times even strains, to sound like a hard-bitten good ol’ girl who gives as good as she gets. She begins by explaining that the man she calls “ex-husband” gave her the dog after their divorce, supposedly to keep her safe in her new apartment. But ex-husband is never quite out of her life—she still helps out at the bar he runs, they still go out—and soon the animal spends most of its time with him. Ex-husband and dog go everywhere together: bars, parties, and restaurants where the waiters cut up steak for the pooch and serve it to him on the sidewalk. In a city famously tolerant of eccentricity, no one objects when the dog sits in the driver’s seat while ex-husband works the pedals and steers from the side. (Conner offers other anecdotes about Big Easy weirdness, including a party at the Mausoleum and a backpack filled with beer worn to the big game.) As she considers her ongoing life, with ex-husband still in the picture and occasionally in her bed, the author flashes back to their first meeting in college, hints at his infidelities, and describes how she set about divorcing him, after making sure that she would be awarded alimony. Though Conner plays hard for laughs, her story has an underlying sadness: the two can never keep apart for long, and when ex-husband becomes terminally ill, ex-wife is there with affection and support.
A love story that just keeps on going.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40121-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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
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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