A nice record for the author’s grandchildren, but not useful for anyone else.
Plodding recollections of a year in wartime Poland.
As a young boy in Warsaw, the author rarely saw his glamorous mother Barbara, who left his care to a governess, Kiki. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Kiki returned to her family, and Barbara decided to take her son to the Ukraine, joining forces with several other relatives to flee Warsaw. She emerges as the real hero of this tale. Food was scarce in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, medicine scarcer still, but Barbara did whatever she had to—from telling lies to flirting with Soviet officers—to get provisions for her family. Finally, determined that her son would not grow up in the Soviet system, Barbara escaped with Julian to Hungary. The basic plotline is engaging enough, but Padowicz’s prose is flat and at times awkward (“The way they walked together didn’t look as though anyone was mad at anyone else anymore”). He relies too much on dialogue, and most of the characters sound alike. He fails to delve into his feelings about leaving Warsaw and losing Kiki, an omission that robs his account of emotional heft. That he provides almost no sensory details similarly distances readers from his experiences. The penultimate scene, for example, in which Padowicz and his mother crawl in the cold and through the snow of the Carpathian Mountains, cries out for descriptors. Padowicz also neglects his story’s potentially powerful religious subtext: Julian and Barbara were Jewish, but the Catholic prayers he learned from Kiki helped them go unnoticed in the Ukraine; that wincing irony is intriguing, but the author never fleshes it out.
A nice record for the author’s grandchildren, but not useful for anyone else.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-89733-544-9
Page Count: 447
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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