by Katharine Smyth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 2019
A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is “any revelation that...
A conceptually ambitious and assured debut, successfully bridging memoir and literary criticism.
Smyth, an American, first read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse when she was studying abroad at Oxford. She had been raised by her British father and Australian mother in their adopted New England, where the author harbored fantasies about their courtship and their charmed relationship. Smyth also had easy access to the sea, for which she felt an affinity that was reinforced by her favorite novel. As her parents’ marriage all but collapsed, complications challenged everything she once felt about life, and her life in particular, and she found refuge and resonance in Woolf’s famously challenging novel. Smyth, who has taught at Columbia and worked for the Paris Review, offers a close reading of that novel from the perspective of an obsessed reader who is both coming-of-age and coming to terms. Smyth’s memoir also serves as a biography of Woolf, particularly about the disappointments and epiphanies that the two share and that Woolf translated into her fiction. Most of all, the book is Smyth’s story of living with an alcoholic father through his protracted death, as he defied warnings that continuing to drink and smoke would kill him and then defied that predicted fate until he no longer could, at which point his death took everyone by surprise. The author writes of the vicious cycle perpetuated by her alcoholic father and clinically depressed mother, each blaming the other, becoming both more estranged and more inextricably bound together. She also writes of how she and her mother have grieved differently and how she may not be feeling what she should—whatever that is. Ultimately, she wonders whether any of this means anything: “Have I come up with anything, has Woolf come up with anything, that is more than merely circling a brutal truth?”
A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is “any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay.”Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6062-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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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...
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
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