More confessional than chronicle, this first volume of the noted expatriate writer's autobiography candidly records the responses of an intense sensibility to a growing self. Writing ``to rediscover the driving force which dominated my life,'' Green (Paris, 1991, etc.) examines his first 16 years— which from the onslaught of adolescence were to be dominated by the tension between his emerging homosexuality and his deeply felt religious convictions. Born in 1900, Green was the youngest child of an American family living in Paris. Their home—though they moved through a series of lodgings whose varying quality reflected changing family fortunes—was an oasis of southern American culture and sentiment, with the South's defeat in the Civil War a persistent source of family identity. Green's earliest memories are of himself as a dreamy child who enjoyed reading and drawing, and whose great happiness was mixed with vivid fears prompted by an overly sensitive imagination that conjured up a world populated as much by lurking demons as by benevolent angels. Green's mother, a religious woman of strong emotions whom the author thinks loved him too much, impressed on the boy the need to be ``pure''—an admonition that, as Green entered adolescence, created intense moral dilemmas, pitting his sexual innocence against his attraction to other boys. This parent died in 1914, during the early days of WW I, an event that created a ``dreadful solitude'' in Green's life and probably accelerated his conversion to Roman Catholicism at age 16. The volume ends as the author, 17, prepares to become an ambulance driver at the front because his father says that it's ``time to think of doing something for the common cause.'' Though perhaps Green examines his life too strenuously, his honesty and palpable faith make this a moving account of what he calls ``God's progression in the human heart.''
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1992
ISBN: 0-7145-2955-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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