A self-critical but refreshingly unrepentant memoir of ’60s radicalism. Born in 1952, Brody grew up in working-class Riverhead and Massapequa, New York (her father ran —a five-acre auto- wrecking yard—), before acquiring the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n— roll credentials of her older contemporaries: she tripped in the Haight, took in Woodstock, jetted to Europe on Icelandic Air, and smoked hash in Amsterdam. All of this she recounts with good humor, capturing the seize-the-day spirit of the times with an easy grace. Writing of the aftermath of the Kent State shootings, for instance, she recalls an invitation by a young hipster to share his sleeping bag before a demonstration: —In that eve-of-battle atmosphere, I thought, why not? If they use live ammunition tomorrow—I could die a virgin.— She also spent time on the fringes of the Left, arguing with her old-guard radical father over Vietnam and logging time with the White Panther Party (from which she earned the designation —Red Star Sister—). As she puts it: —I was . . . moving spasmodically, from plot point to plot point, like a character in a melodrama.— All these experiences mark the turmoil and idealism to which her subtitle alludes, and she writes of them skillfully and without self-indulgence. Although she clearly rues some of the rhetorical (and the daily) excesses of the New Left, Brody refuses to follow the path of David Horowitz and other ’60s rebels-turned-rightists. —By telling you this story of the war years in terms of my own life,— she instead volunteers, —I hope to salvage some sense of the utopianism and the complicated vision of country and self that dazzled so many of us in the age we held in common.— Casually convincing sentences and a steadfast memory make this a representative memoir of a troubled era.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1998
ISBN: 1-886913-15-3
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Ruminator Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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