bookshelf

LOUISE

Name: LOUISE
Author: Louise Krug
ISBN: 978-1-936787012

AMENDED

by Louise Krug ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2012

There are fine moments here, but also considerable padding, so that, like so many other books, this is really a magazine...

bookshelf

Memoir of a life turned upside down by illness.

Krug begins her slender memoir with the story of her involvement in a bit of journalistic subterfuge, following Britney Spears around while trying not to get caught at it. “I was a pretty girl with an unknown face—not unusual for the Four Seasons resort in Santa Barbara,” she writes. “I would not stand out.” But life had other plans for her. Thanks to the “medical fluke” of a burst blood vessel in the pons region of the brain, she found herself in the emergency room. Things went from bad to worse: Soon she was seeing double, her face a rictus of pain, her body refusing to cooperate in doing the slightest task, walker and wheelchair and eye patch her constant props. The dramatic apex of the book comes early on, as she suffers while doctors come and go, talking as if she were not there about a patient who may or may not recover. Krug is honest to a fault about these out-of-body moments, and she writes with an easygoing twang about what’s happening to her: “Things in the brain move around like prizes in a Jell-O salad.” If that image doesn’t mean anything in places without such culinary treats, then she frequently offers parallel takes on the same event, for the trick of the book is its employment of different points of view. Krug’s mother, friends and a much-put-upon boyfriend all figure in the telling of the tale. The shift from one to the other and back to first-person is not always smooth or successful, but the point is made: A terrible affliction may befall just one person, but a surrounding company of players is implicated in the proceedings. The best parts of the book are Krug’s occasional notes on how the rest of us can be accommodating—and not patronizing.

There are fine moments here, but also considerable padding, so that, like so many other books, this is really a magazine article—interesting and readable, but an article all the same.

Pub Date: April 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-936787012

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Black Balloon Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

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...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)