by Larry King with Marty Appel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1992
More good-natured memoirs from the king of chat. King (Tell Me More, 1990, etc.) rules the live airwaves these days. Here, he gives a clue to his success, saying ``I was always...Immediate Gratification King. It's why I love doing live radio and live television.'' It's also why he loves Brooklyn, the subject of these boyhood memoirs. King (born in 1933) was raised there in a Jewish-and-Italian neighborhood where the pursuit of pleasure was the name of the game. Food was ``a religious experience''—miraculous chocolate egg-creams, heavenly blintzes (``eat six or seven, then get right in your car and drive to the hospital for your heart attack''). Adventures with a teenage gang made way for girl-chasing and amateur theatrics. Working one summer in the Catskills, King ``got laid...on home plate at the Grossinger's softball field''; back in Bensonhurst, he matched muscles in a street-corner contest with another local Jewish boy, future Dodger superstar Sandy Koufax. Life revolved around family (lots of eccentric relatives here), sports, and, increasingly, the magic of radio. King imagines what it would have been like to be on CNN back in those days (from a fantasy interview with Hitler: ``It vas the people of Poland who called for us''). Happy memories notwithstanding, times were tough: King's father died young, and his mother went on welfare and worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop. King's prospects seemed gloomy. He was a terrible student, graduating high school with a 66 average; only his chutzpah and good will, both enormous, pulled him through. King concludes with a nostalgic visit to his childhood haunts. Murray the Barber is gone, so is Maltz's Candy Store; the neighborhood is sliding downhill. But still ``those inanimate objects were breathing that weekend, whispering memories to me, making my life full''—and making this reminiscence a warmhearted winner.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-49356-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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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