In the best-selling And So It Goes (1986), Ellerbee chronicled her career in TV through her tenure at NBC News. Here, she ranges loosely over events preceding and following those years and also includes some essays/meditations on love, the politics of the Sixties, the changing role of women, and the meaning of life as distilled at its midpoint by this survivor of ``five networks and four marriages.'' Television, not surprisingly, emerges as Ellerbee's lifelong demon-lover. She deplores what TV has done to family and social life-replacing discourse, turning lazy, generous holiday dinners to rushed preludes to the kickoff. What it has done to political life is equally damnable, she argues, making campaigns into ``jumping frog contests.'' TV has also, she says, debased the standard of literacy in this country; and yet Ellerbee sees the medium as a major force for political change and mass education. In a more personal vein, she talks about her idealism-a summer waitressing job as a teen-ager when she first discovered radical ideas and activism, the excitement of the Sixties when it seemed the world could be changed by partying. She describes the aging and tarnishing of that idealism through divorces and career disappointments, and her attempts, in her 40s, to polish it all up with alcohol, which put her into the Betty Ford Center. The Maxwell House episode, in which Ellerbee was widely criticized for appearing in a commercial set up like a newscast, is defended as a last-ditch effort to save her fledgling production company- only a boob, she maintains, would have mistaken the news-show set and her reportorial delivery for actual objective broadcast journalism. Some funny lines coexist here with some sentimental clunkers, while incisive observations share space with clichÇs and ramblings. Grit admixed with gold, then, worth sifting through.
Pub Date: May 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13623-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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