by Le Anne Schreiber ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 1996
Soulful, elegant memoirs from Schreiber (Midstream, 1990) that are everywhere touched by death. A decade back Schreiber moved, solo, from Manhattan to Columbia County in not-too-far-upstate New York. She wanted time for herself; she wanted sunlight; she wanted to write and read. She starts these memoirs with getting to know the wildlands that compose half of her one-acre patch, with the nearby trout waters and the little town of Ancram. She develops a highly communicative if reluctant relationship with a stray cat. She takes on, again reluctantly, the town's main source of employment and its main source of pollution, a smoke-belching, stinking paper mill. In the midst of these episodes, in one godawful five-year stretch, her entire family dies: first her mother, followed by her father, then her 50-year-old brother. She weaves these people in and out of her writing (she sees her mother in the blue eyes of the cat, is prompted to confront the paper mill because she had promised to bury her father in the stream it was befouling) and in the process stirs up feelings of loss and recovery. The second half of the book is less immediate—the scope here goes beyond Ancram, into youth and aging and mortality, aloneness and bliss and the strange world of dreams. But it is no less searching. The author won't stand for living with illusions and gives death more than a once-over. Wondrously, she retains a sense of humor and playfulness. Imagery and lyricism seem to come naturally to Schreiber; she delights in a school of little bluefish swimming through her preternaturally clear reflection on a lake surface. Only a tough customer could survive this emotional milling; only a fine talent could write about it so potently.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1996
ISBN: 1-55821-494-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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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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