A breath of fresh air. (8-page photo insert, not seen)
Freelance writer Winters engagingly narrates her trek along most of the Appalachian Trail, from its start in Georgia to its end in Maine.
The Appalachian Trail, or AT, served as a rite of passage for the author, who left a series of dead-end jobs and ended a disastrous relationship before beginning her journey at the summit of Springer Mountain, Georgia. (The eight-mile path leading to the trailhead is so steep that some hikers have given up before reaching the actual AT.) The author—trail name Amazin’ Grace—spent six months hiking the AT’s 2,000 miles, along which she became part of a community of travelers with monikers like Dances With Mice, Bearbait, Maine Event, and G.R. Dia. Braced for a grueling pilgrimage, Winters was unprepared for the social side of trail life. Although she usually walked alone during the day, her nights were spent with assorted hikers at mice- and skunk-infested shelters. The majesty of nature and the easygoing support of other “thruhikers” helped ease Winters’s initial loneliness and enabled her to forge a new relationship, this time with someone she met on the trail. The author includes myriad observations of AT culture and etiquette. Some hikers are purists walking only on the “official” white-blazed AT. Others occasionally hike trails marked with blue blazes; these are older sections of the AT, or trails that intersect with roads leading toward much-needed supplies. “Yellow-blazing” is hitchhiking, “green-blazing” is not following a trail at all, and “ghost-blazing” is daring to venture where original white AT markers have been painted out or faded. The Trail itself? As one short-timer put it: “Let’s see . . . up and down, up and down, up and down. Followed by down and up.”
A breath of fresh air. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55583-658-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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