Canadian poet Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid) made two return journeys to his birthplace, Ceylon, in 1978 and 1980—and the result is this slight, graceful mosaic: a collection of poetic impressions and less poetic (but far more involving) Ondaatje-family stories. "How I have used them. . . . They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong." Thus, Ondaatje pieces together his parents' histories from elderly relatives still living in Ceylon—Aunt Dolly, for instance, whose "80-year-old brain leaps like a spark plug bringing this year that year to life." And the world of these memories is primarily that of 1920s/1930s Ceylon high-society—not the European colonials, but the resident elite: "Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations"; the preoccupations were gambling, drink, romance. So most of the friends and family hardly noticed at first that Ondaatje's suave soldier-father was an alcoholic—until he began ripping off his clothes on the railway or (in desperation) draining the liquid from kerosene lamps into his mouth. And grandmother Lalla, too, was an ancestor worth reconstructing: an earthy, merry widow ("loved most by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm"), the first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy, the triumphant victim of a 1947 flood—"her last perfect journey," evoked in imaginative detail here. Ondaatje captures less personally particular aspects of Ceylon as well: the heat, the snakes, the beautiful alphabet, the exotic wildlife. But, while there's no strong dramatic shape to his rediscovery of his parents' past (Ondaatje himself remains a blur), it's the family history that almost always holds this delicate assemblage together-and extends its appeal to a readership beyond Ondaatje's poetry-oriented following.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1982
ISBN: 0679746692
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1982
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
SEEN & HEARD
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