A literary tapestry of true crime, memoir and personal essay that simultaneously enthralls and disturbs.
A stint as a juror leads, many years later, to a relationship with a convicted killer.
In 1978, the murder of Larry Hasker rocked peaceful Honolulu, his body found just 25 feet from a highway. At the time, Kansas-born Spalding, recently married to a photographer and living in Honolulu, read about the crime in the paper. Four years later, she became an alternate juror in the murder trial of young Maryann Acker. Hasker was one of two victims in a crime spree; Maryann’s husband William had already been convicted of killing the other, Cesario Arauza. In a bizarre twist, William was a prosecution witness in the case against Maryann, predictably foisting responsibility onto her. Spalding noted numerous anomalies in the proceedings and felt an affinity for Maryann, only 18 at the time of the crime. On the last day of the trial, Spalding arrived late and was abruptly dismissed. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Toronto and thought little of Maryann until a decade later, when she came upon her notes from the trial. After a little digging, she was amazed to learn that Maryann was still in prison and contacted her. (In the meantime, Spalding had become a critically acclaimed novelist and scholar (Mere, 2001, etc.), now married to Booker Prize–winning author Michael Ondaatje.) Spalding’s research supplements letters from Maryann about her early years and recent struggles, and snippets of news articles and transcripts pepper the narrative. The author also fleshes out Maryann’s story before prison as well as her efforts to gain release. Short, elegantly written chapters find Spalding examining her own life through the prism of Maryann’s, with ruminations on family and love and the details of everyday living.
A literary tapestry of true crime, memoir and personal essay that simultaneously enthralls and disturbs.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42476-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
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