Oe's (The Silent Cry, 1975, etc.) first new book since his 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature is a slender memoir returning to a familiar subject, his brain-injured son. The novelist has written about his first son Hikari's development on several occasions, in short stories, novels, and essays. Clearly, the experience of having a handicapped child is one that has marked his creative development, although that aspect of his life is covered only obliquely in this collection of essays about Hikari and the rest of the Oe family. The book's title carries a double meaning, repeatedly restated throughout its 15 essays (and in an afterword by Oe's wife, Yukari, who also provides the delicate line drawings at the head of each chapter). The Oe family has undergone a process of healing, achieving an acceptance of Hikari's limitations and a willingness, even eagerness, to let him test their boundaries. At the same time, their life with Hikari has left them better equipped to extend themselves to one another, to be a family that heals. This is nowhere more apparent than in Oe's many references to the strains caused by the presence of his 90-year-old mother-in-law, frail and quite senile, in the family home. Today Hikari is in his 30s, a serious and well-regarded composer of chamber music. Music, Oe says, has long provided Hikari's primary means of communication with an outside world that he often finds baffling. It is his music that occasions the book's most triumphant and moving moments, a musical tour of Europe in which Hikari gets to hear and meet many great European musicians in person. Oe's treatment of his family's struggle is always frank and shines with the quiet, unassuming intelligence and decency that has consistently been at the heart of his work. A lovely book, low-key, avoiding easy sentimentality, honest to a fault. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 4-7700-2048-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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