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TWITCH AND SHOUT

Name: TWITCH AND SHOUT
Author: Lowell Handler
ISBN: 0-525-94216-5

A TOURETTER'S TALE

by Lowell Handler ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1998

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Episodic, revealing memoirs of a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome, a neurological disorder whose symptoms include uncontrollable tics and touching and odd vocalizations. Handler, a photojournalist and faculty member of the New School for Social Research, was born with the disorder but not diagnosed until he was a senior at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Relieved to know that his condition had a name and that he wasn—t alone, Handler eventually became active in the Tourette’s Syndrome Association, and it was through this organization that he found the subjects for a series of portraits of Touretters that Life magazine assigned him to produce. Although that series didn—t run in Life, the experience led him to contact neurologist Oliver Sacks to suggest a collaboration, and their joint photo essay on a Tourette’s family was published worldwide. In 1989, he began a five-year collaboration with film producer Laurel Chiten on a documentary about Tourette’s Syndrome, also titled Twitch & Shout. Thus the disorder has not only shaped Handler’s life, but has been the focus of most of his life’s work. His account of his travels around the country with Sacks as they sought out Touretters is a warts-and-all picture of the noted author, whose peculiar sleeping habits and other idiosyncracies Handler is not averse to recording. He is even more forthright about his own problems, however, describing his search for relief through various drugs (Haldol, pimozide, and for a long time a combination of Prozac and marijuana), his difficult relationship with his brother, the end of his unhappy marriage, in which his pot-smoking lifestyle played no small part, and his brief affair with an especially troubled young woman. With its disjointed structure and photographs that seem to have been flipped carelessly, even haphazardly, onto the page, this memoir has all the energy and twitchiness of Tourette’s Syndrome, which is probably exactly what Handler intended.

Pub Date: May 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-525-94216-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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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.

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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

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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...

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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)