by Lise Funderburg ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2008
Charming and often moving—will appeal to a broad range of readers, from fans of Wendell Berry to those of Toni Morrison.
A sometimes exasperated, sometimes joyful account of a daughter’s reconnecting with a father across lines of generation, ethnicity, geography and family history.
The genre of memoirs by adult baby-boomer children tending to their infirm, elderly parents is likely to be a growth industry in the near future. Funderburg (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race, 1994) sets the critical bar high with this account of homecoming, in this case to her father’s farm in the Georgia countryside. Born in 1926, a light-hued African-American who passed for white farther north, George Funderburg had fled from there decades earlier. He “picked tobacco in Connecticut, sold cookbooks in Columbus, and...took the job I most liked to hear about, on a Detroit Night Boat,” writes his daughter, to say nothing of gaining a Wharton education and marrying across a then strict color line to produce three daughters. Dad explains his trajectory with an admirable motto: “I never wanted anybody to tell me what to do.” Along the way, though, he lost his family. Now, as Dad, ailing with cancer, prepares for his end, he passes along some of the other lessons he has learned in life, most along the lines of respecting other people, paying as well as you can and keeping mind and body active. Dad is a character, and his daughter is a gracious storyteller who holds his eccentricities at a humorous but never ironic distance. For instance, he is a man of deeply felt if transient enthusiasms who makes projects of all sorts of things (“If there’s an instructional video, all the better”), including an ingenious meat smoker from which the book takes its title, producing pork so sugary that it’s like candy. As Dad begins to decline, daughter finds more in their past to wrestle with, lending tension to an already perfectly plotted and well-paced memoir.
Charming and often moving—will appeal to a broad range of readers, from fans of Wendell Berry to those of Toni Morrison.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4766-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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