Bongie’s essay is one among various new studies of Sade: Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge, Octavio Paz’s An Erotic Beyond, and most recently ,Francine du Plessix Gray’s At Home with the Marquis de Sade. The “divine Marquis,” like some of the diseases featured in his novels, is not easy to get rid of. Throughout the 19th century, Sade and his pornographic novels were an underground phenomenon. Only in the 20th century did his reputation move into the realm of public discourse and legitimate publishing. Assorted modern commentators—from Guillaume Apollinaire to Camille Paglia—have hailed Sade as a free spirit, a courageous thinker, and a precursor of modernist attitudes toward sex, violence, and power. According to Bongie (professor emeritus of French, Univ. of British Columbia), the various biographers have uncritically cultivated the myth of Sade as a martyr to freedom of conscience. By contrast, Bongie seeks to deflate Sade’s overblown reputation. His scholarship is painstaking and critical, yet free of polemical bluster. Moreover, Bongie has managed to unearth a few new archival facts about Sade’s parents. The mother may be, he suggests, the key figure. Was she cold and aloof from his life, as the other biographers have supposed? Or did the callous and woman-hating son simply rebuff her as an inconsequential figure? Bongie conjectures the latter, though no conclusive evidence can be produced for either position. Bongie’s archival diligence has also brought to light a few fresh details about the debauched life of Sade’s father. Yet the upshot of his research is a negative finding: “we are still too ignorant of Sade’s basic biographical facts, especially those relating to his formative years, to hope to even begin “explaining’ him.” Still, he argues that based on what we do know, Sade’s life and works reveal a man remarkable only as an unprincipled opportunist, phony rebel, and self-absorbed devotee of predatory sexuality. A sober, scholarly, and skeptical exploration of the Marquis de Sade’s life and contemporary reputation.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-226-06420-4
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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