by Michael Mewshaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 2015
Mewshaw’s account is more devilish (and sometimes downright cruel) than sympathetic, but it’s also well-written, funny and...
Vidal unvarnished: the private life of an aging provocateur.
Near the end of this memoir of life with Gore Vidal (1925-2012), novelist and journalist Mewshaw (If You Could See Me Now, 2011, etc.) writes that he prefers to remember how “generous and hospitable” Vidal was. “Not at all the bitchy, mean-spirited man his critics imagined.” It’s an odd conclusion to a book that, if anything, makes the opposite case. Mewshaw knew Vidal well, as a friend, interview subject, dinner companion and part-time expat neighbor in Italy, but the relationship clearly tested his patience. As he writes, “[Vidal] embodied Goethe’s dictum that ‘the world only goes forward because of those who oppose it.’ And those who oppose it have to expect to take their lumps.” Although he never denies Vidal his assets—literary brilliance, productivity, loyalty, professional and financial help to others—Mewshaw was also clearly worn out by the older writer’s boorishness, self-absorption, and apparent decadeslong ambition to eat and drink himself to death. As the author sees it, Vidal’s lordly, self-satisfied demeanor was something of a ruse; he was also beset by demons—old resentments, vindictiveness, oversensitivity to slights—which he battled with alcohol and pills. Luckily, he also had a hardy constitution; Mewshaw recalls one evening after the next seeing Vidal drinking enough wine or whiskey to slay an ox, only to get up the next morning and write. Consequently, the book counterbalances Vidal's airbrushed self-portrait in Palimpsest (1995), which Mewshaw writes “wasn’t so much a memoir as a novel with a thoroughly unreliable narrator.” Mewshaw gives a good inside picture of Vidal’s domestic life, as well as showing his fears, vulnerabilities and full-time dependence on his 50-plus–year partner, Howard Austen, whose death in 2003 left Vidal with little more than alcohol for consolation.
Mewshaw’s account is more devilish (and sometimes downright cruel) than sympathetic, but it’s also well-written, funny and never boring. Literary lives don’t get dishier.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0374280482
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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PROFILES
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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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