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AN AMERICAN GIRL

Name: AN AMERICAN GIRL
Author: Mary Cantwell
ISBN: 0-394-57502-4

THE TRIALS AND CHARMS OF GROWING UP IN 1930S AMERICA

by Mary Cantwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1992

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From New York Times editorial-board member and veteran columnist Cantwell, a memoir of growing up during the 1930's and 40's in the town of Bristol, New Hampshire. ``I have come down with the Bristol Complaint,'' Cantwell announces early in the book: ``People who have the Bristol Complaint can never leave town. The elm trees snag them. So does the harbor and the wild roses and the history.'' Cantwell does, of course, manage to leave town, but the town remains inside her, and, here, she brings it to her readers all the way back from its history of colonial immigrants and traders, of General LaFayette (who once camped there, but left when winter set in) and of ``Philip, King of the Wampanoags'' (the bones of whose people lie under the ground)—and on through the lives of her beloved grandparents, known as Ganny and Gampy (she still believes Gampy was once a bootlegger); of her own parents, Leo Cantwell and Mary Lonergan; and thus to the birth and growing up of Mary Lee Cantwell and her younger sister, Diana. Seldom have a town and its memoirist been more perfectly blended than they are here (``It was as if Bristol were a book I couldn't put down,'' says the author), and in her subtle and delicately told tales of being a young child, of getting polio, of remembering WW II, of learning the stark cruelties of social class, of struggling into adolescence, of finally graduating from high school and getting ready to leave home—in all of these, Cantwell embraces sentiment without ever becoming sentimental, and makes her words fall into place with a quiet perfection. ``If I don't get out of Bristol it will always be three o'clock in the afternoon,'' she says; and yet, even so, amid much, much more, she remembers for us a long-ago afternoon with her high-school girlfriends when ``we walked through air that was as silver as the bay.'' Evocative, lovely, deeply felt, and mature personal writing about a past that's gone.

Pub Date: June 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-394-57502-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)