A soulful memoir of prairie life. Name the heartbreak, and Linda Hasselstrom (Leaning Into The Wind, 1997, etc.) has faced it. Early on, her father, a taciturn and practical-minded Wyoming rancher, ordered her either to abandon her writing and take a $300-a-month job as a ranch hand, or get off the family spread and try her luck in the big city. Hasselstrom took the latter course, relocating to the prairie metropolis of Cheyenne and, as it turned out, eventually producing a distinguished body of essays and poems. In this memoir, Hasselstrom revisits her life on the ranch, a hard and unforgiving place where issues of life and death are never far away. In one chapter, she writes, for instance, of her pride at receiving a fine .22 rifle as a gift on her twelfth birthday, a gift that immediately had to be put to use against a sick steer and a family of barn-invading raccoons. “One by one, they put their paws over their eyes,” she writes. “I groaned, but I shot them anyway.” The epiphanies come fast and furious, as Hasselstrom faces the death of her second husband to cancer and the loss of her father, who, she discovers, had kept a memoir of his own, an archive apparently fated to have only one reader—his daughter. Having inherited the ranch from which she had been exiled, she closes her book by pondering whether she has any moral right to the land, inasmuch as she will have no children, has no intention of working the ranch, and has no real connection to it, for “everyone who ties me to this place is subsiding into the land.” Hasselstrom is a careful writer who reveals just enough of herself without falling into sentimentality, and her book is a healthy corrective for anyone who imagines that there’s anything romantic about the cowboy way of life.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55821-887-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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