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INIGO

Name: INIGO
Author: Michael Leapman
ISBN: 0-7553-1002-0

THE TROUBLED LIFE OF INIGO JONES, ARCHITECT OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

by Michael Leapman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2004

A capable, readable life of a man who was arguably less accomplished but inarguably more interesting than his younger...

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A lively biography of Inigo Jones (1573–1652), “a proud, vain, quarrelsome hypochondriac” who, in his odd moments, designed some of England’s most famous buildings.

Not many of Jones’s buildings stand intact, allows Londoner and journalist Leapman (The World for a Shilling, not reviewed), and “many works speculatively attributed to Inigo are now thought to have been designed by others.” Still, the plan of Covent Garden and the reality of London’s Banqueting House, before which Charles I lost his head in January 1649, provide ample evidence of his brilliance as a designer and builder who improved Italianate models with his own innovations. Jones’s rise to fame and influence was unlikely, for he was born into comparative poverty, the son of a clothmaker. Yet, thanks to a sort of Head Start program put into place by Queen Elizabeth in the later stages of her reign, he was given a chance to travel to Italy, soak up some culture, and, more important, get to know the nobility. As a dedicated “young man on the make,” Jones soon came into his own as a designer of masques—elaborate and strange rituals of the rich and famous of the day, which Leapman nicely deconstructs—and as a litterateur who was the sometime friend, sometime rival of the likes of Ben Jonson and George Chapman. Considering his highly evolved toadying, it’s ironic that Jones’s most famous building should have been a “backdrop for regicide,” but Cromwell and company almost certainly did so deliberately, counterposing Jones’s classicism with their own ideas of modernity as they relieved Charles of his head. Leapman brightly writes that in this instance Jones’s “scenery, as always, but immaculate; but on this occasion he had no control over the script.”

A capable, readable life of a man who was arguably less accomplished but inarguably more interesting than his younger contemporary Christopher Wren.

Pub Date: July 15, 2004

ISBN: 0-7553-1002-0

Page Count: 412

Publisher: Headline

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004

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)