A memoir that, despite a few flaws, offers an engaging slice of 20th-century American life.
A debut author reflects on different periods of his life, from being a closeted Navy man during World War II to being an out-and-proud businessman in the 1970s.
Klein was born to a family of “Volga Germans” in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1924. Growing up, he felt that he was clearly different from other boys, and he was drawn to what were considered “feminine” tasks, such as cooking; later, he found that he was attracted to other men. However, he hid this part of himself away. After high school, toward the end of WWII, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he learned quickly that being openly gay would hinder his career. He also felt that he “had to prove that I was a ‘man’ and could do things better than anyone else.” To that end, he engaged in sexual activity with women at every chance. Klein survived boot camp (and several harrowing plane landings), and his military career would take him from Texas to Alaska and elsewhere before he was discharged and wound up in Manhattan. There, in 1954, he flirted with the gay culture of Broadway and downtown while buckling down to become a journalist for Air Force Magazine. At this point, Klein fully embraced the fact that he was gay. During this time, he also met eccentric characters, such as New Orleanian Howard Lane, who would become a dear friend. A move to California in the early 1970s would lead him to become a restaurant owner and the director of a ski association. The memoir’s later chapters deliver some of the most memorable imagery, such as a scene of Lane drunkenly dancing while wearing a tutu. However, the timeline of Klein’s life starts to become a bit blurry—his initial introduction into gay life in New York, for example, is glossed over, and some chapters would have benefited from a more careful edit to excise some repetition. However, these faults are easy to forgive, as Klein proves to be a great storyteller; his voice feels young and energetic as he cracks jokes and tells of encounters with celebrities, such as Marlon Brando and Joel Grey. Indeed, it’s impossible to not get swept up in his memorable tales.
A memoir that, despite a few flaws, offers an engaging slice of 20th-century American life.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3741-2
Page Count: 202
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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