Labored, self-indulgent womb-gazing.
Novelist McElmurray (Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, 1999) recounts in overwrought prose how she gave up her newborn son for adoption and lived to regret it.
Although she can’t remember whether her baby was born in June or July 1973, the author describes vividly the harrowing experience of giving birth at age 16. She never explicitly explains why she decided to give up her son, or why she refused to allow her father to adopt him, but she makes it abundantly clear that her own parents were poor role models, dwelling on the awfulness of her mother, an agoraphobic, controlling woman obsessed with cleanliness and incapable of showing love. When her parents divorced, McElmurray chose to live with her father and quickly plunged into a world of drugs, drinking, and teenage sex. A pregnant runaway at 15, she lived the hippie life until hauled home by her father and forced into marriage. Winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, her memoir features a graphic account of her hippie days that is creative indeed. What McElmurray (Creative Writing/Georgia College and State Univ.) cannot remember she recreates, leaving the reader wondering how much of her story is real and how much spun from an inventive writer’s brain. Once divorced from her husband, she continued her education and became a teacher. From an adult perspective, she analyzes her subsequent sexual behavior, detailing various unrewarding love affairs. She also covers a reunion with her stifled mother, eventual marriage to an appreciative man, and her long-delayed efforts to locate her son.
Labored, self-indulgent womb-gazing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2681-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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