Despite the interesting details of her back story, Brooks-Dalton’s journey of reinvention is disappointingly mundane and...
A travel-hungry young woman’s memoir of her unexpected love affair with motorcycles.
It only takes Brooks-Dalton one page to exclaim her newfound passion for motorcycles. The cringeworthy statement is released upon recognizing for the first time her desire to take to the open road on two wheels: “I wanted to be the one riding that motherfucker.” Notwithstanding that this attempt to sound rebellious misses the mark, the author recounts how she found herself suddenly attracted to motorcycles when, upon leaving the security of a long-term relationship in Australia, she returned home to New England after years of traveling abroad and began researching them as a diversion, a way of losing herself in a new experience. As symbols of freedom and independence, motorcycles fed Brooks-Dalton’s passion for adventure and offered her a channel for her listless behavior, which included typical adolescent indulgences in drinking and drugs, and somewhat ironically grounded her. She connects her wanderlust to the memory of her family growing up, particularly her brother, who developed paranoid delusions about God and quickly left the family for the West. Without an anchor at home and following in the footsteps of her mother, who also traveled abroad at a young age, she decided to leave at 17. Conveying her travels as well as her desire for new experiences, Brooks-Dalton is seduced by aphoristiclike turns of phrase, but her writing is often cliché-ridden and melodramatic: “Transformation takes sweat and tears; it can’t be bought with a plane ticket or an admission of love.” The author also relies on awkwardly inserted physics terms (e.g., “acceleration,” “velocity,” “entropy”), also used as chapter titles, to tie in a concept related to motorcycles and her emotional state. The results are heavy-handed, and these jargon-y interludes fail to achieve their intended resonance.
Despite the interesting details of her back story, Brooks-Dalton’s journey of reinvention is disappointingly mundane and uneventful.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1594633218
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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