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PAGAN TIME

Name: PAGAN TIME
Author: Micah Perks
ISBN: 1-58243-147-7

AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

by Micah Perks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2001

As in all memoirs of any depth, the answers here are bound to be both yes and no, but for some reason this ambivalence seems...

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A somewhat precious account of a run-of-the-mill bohemian childhood, by novelist Perks (We Are Gathered Here, 1996).

“The time of my childhood was the nineteen sixties,” begins the author, who immediately seeks to stifle all nascent yawns by admitting, “I know what you’re thinking—marijuana, free love, Woodstock and Watts and Vietnam.” Her 1960s were different (in the first place, she was too young at the time for sex or drugs), but they still conform in a general way to the pattern of the era. Her family lived in a remote town in the Adirondacks, where her parents were involved in the experimental Valley Commune School, which was part commune, part halfway home for disturbed adolescents. Her mother was from Brooklyn, her father from England. Jovial and well-read, they were not hippies exactly, but they had both dropped out of society to some degree—and they certainly didn’t run a very tidy ship, either. Lessons were erratic, sometimes quite advanced, and often overlooked altogether. The author was sent for some time to the much more conventional local public school, where she found herself predictably out of sorts among classmates used to the daily routine and boredom of ordinary school life. For a while the entire family was taken back to England with Dad, who settled them for a while in Devon. Back in the States a few years later, the father becomes very involved in Buddhism. Eventually, the author grows up. As an adult, Perks doesn’t know what to make of her childhood or her parents. Does she resent them or love them? Was she neglected or lucky?

As in all memoirs of any depth, the answers here are bound to be both yes and no, but for some reason this ambivalence seems to go farther than usual in Perks’s case—to the point that her story begins to seem as pointless to the reader as it does to the author herself.

Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2001

ISBN: 1-58243-147-7

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | 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)