An engaging if scattershot valedictory, full of hard-won insights.
A man reflects on a richly variegated life of child rearing, career upheavals, spiritual searching and quixotic political crusades in this colorful, rambling memoir.
The author has a lot of experience under his belt, including a hardscrabble boyhood during the Great Depression, service in the Navy in World War II, a 62-year marriage that produced seven kids and a work-history that swerved improbably from sales to Catholic adult-education to a stint as a Colorado state senator. He also has a probing intellect with an idealistic, liberal bent—he was a peace activist during the Vietnam War and a campaign worker for George McGovern—and a pronounced maverick streak. (His signature issue as a state senator was the legalization of industrial hemp, an initiative that put him in harness with movie-star/activist Woody Harrelson.) Casey wrote this autobiography over 30 years in stop-and-start installments that he gave to his children as Christmas keepsakes, and the result reads like a fragmented series of diary entries. The author meanders from chronicles of everyday doings in the present to reminiscences of the past, anecdotes about long-lost friends (including a man who went to Canada to raise marijuana and start a doomsday cult), pungent commentary on youthful sexual experiences, curmudgeonly diatribes against anti-smoking Nazis and tongue-in-cheek odes to the wonders of Grape Nuts. Fortunately, Casey is a lively writer who manages to hold the reader’s interest as he rummages through this miscellany of memories and peeves. There are darkly moving passages in which he recalls wanting to end his life because of soul-killing jobs or financial reversals, and cynically comical scenes of weathering dirty tricks and stultifying stump speeches on the campaign trail. Threaded through is Casey’s persistent questioning of his Catholic beliefs and of the meaning of his life, one leads him to a compelling affirmation of family and a disillusioned but never despairing faith that “God is no more than the reality of the dignity and value of every human being.”
An engaging if scattershot valedictory, full of hard-won insights.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434981844
Page Count: 180
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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