Martin is an expert memoirist willing to explore every remembered utterance for emotional weight, though at times he keeps...
A novelist explores his rural, dysfunctional upbringing for hints of the writer he would become.
For his third memoir, Martin (English and Creative Writing/Ohio St. Univ.; Break the Skin, 2011, etc.) assembles a series of personal essays that run roughly in chronological order, from his childhood in a small Illinois farm town to his more urbane, literate adulthood. His father looms large over many of these pieces, and understandably so: He lost both of his hands in a farming accident, becoming a sour and abusive parent, and many of the early pieces are concerned with Martin proving his manliness to adults. In “You Want It?,” a particularly strong piece, the author recalls working a summer farm job at 14 and shrewdly lays out the subtle parrying among the boys, exposing the reasons why some boys bully and why some do or don’t push back. Martin can seemingly turn any subject back to his hardscrabble youth: Asked to write about the Pittsburgh mansion of robber baron Henry Clay Frick, he bounces the industrialist’s wealth against the lives of the working-class men he better relates to. The author’s prose is carefully controlled, which is a welcome counter to the flash, drama and broad comedy that mark noisier (and more factually suspect) memoirs. But at times the narrative feels more bloodless than it ought to be. On a number of occasions Martin mentions a debate with his wife over their childlessness, but his avoidance of discussing the tension between them sticks out. In “Somniloquy,” he strains to connect his childhood sleepwalking to his mother-in-law’s sad decline from Alzheimer’s, but some stories don’t need such effortful metaphorical setups or so much attention on the author.
Martin is an expert memoirist willing to explore every remembered utterance for emotional weight, though at times he keeps the reader at too far a distance.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3647-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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