An endearing retrospective, beginning and ending as one man’s examination of a tragic segment of his life, which comments...
More than two decades after his prosecution and imprisonment for operating an aircraft while intoxicated, a Northwest Airlines captain breaks from the media frenzy surrounding his firing and public humiliation to offer his own version of events.
Prouse, whose childhood in Wichita and other cities in the Midwest and South was marred by the “cotton-mouthed fear” of facing neighborhood bullies and the troubles of alcoholic parents, provides a memoir that skips alternately between his becoming a pilot in the Marines and the lapse of judgment that undid everything he had earned. After graduating high school, Prouse joined the Marines and was selected to receive flight training at a military institution in Pensacola. A stint at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro followed in 1963, as did employment during the Vietnam War flying combat missions, before Prouse departed the military to pursue work as a commercial pilot in 1968. His noteworthy career came to a halt in 1990, when he was arrested upon landing a flight in Minneapolis after a night of hard drinking with his colleagues. He was charged and sent to prison. Prouse stares steadfastly into his own history as an alcoholic, detailing even the most traumatic events with a remarkable self-awareness; he explains without excuse how his alcoholism strained his relationship with his wife and almost severed his relationship with his daughter, Dawn. Prouse, who obtained a presidential pardon for his mistake and eventually regained captain status with Northwest Airlines, constructs prose strengthened by sharp anecdotes. However, the flow of Prouse’s story line can become stagnant under the weight of several tedious or obtuse passages. Although the divergences between the book’s dual narratives can distract or appear incongruous, Prouse’s recollection of his incarceration ultimately succeeds in indicting the prison system for corruption, sadism, incompetence and unsafe operations.
An endearing retrospective, beginning and ending as one man’s examination of a tragic segment of his life, which comments meaningfully on addiction and the unpredictable nature of bureaucratic systems.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460951996
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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