by Michael Sims ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2017
Even the most learned of Baker Street Irregulars will enjoy Sims’ look at the making of Sherlock Holmes.
Those were the footprints of a gigantic…forensic scientist!
Like Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler, if for very different reasons, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, have filled libraries with secondary works. Sims (The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond, 2014, etc.), a thoughtful literary biographer and sympathetic reader, adds a fine book to their number with this portrait of Doyle as a medical practitioner who wedded a talent for writing with the good fortune of having a useful model in the form of one of his professors. Joseph Bell, eccentric and inimitable, had an “oracular ability not only to diagnose illness but also to perceive details about patients’ personal lives.” Like Holmes, Bell could look at a frayed sleeve and divine how it got that way or could listen to a person speak and know within a couple of blocks where he or she hailed from and the circumstances of his or her life. But why a detective and not some version of a crusading coroner? Perhaps because such a figure didn’t exist, and even the detective was a fairly new creation, a genealogy that Sims ably traces a few decades before Doyle’s time to Edgar Allan Poe and his Dupin. Holmes is not just a Dupin, though; it took that leavening of Bell to lift Doyle from his mithridatic experiments with drugs and poisons to fame. Sims’ story effectively retells the story of the young Doyle as something of a Holmes himself, someone who could persuade readers that “seeming clairvoyance beyond the limits of direct knowledge was possible in the real world.” The author’s deeply researched but reader-friendly take on Doyle and Holmes fits nicely along recent books by Michael Dirda and Barry Grant, and it stands, like Samuel Rosenberg’s centrifugal book Naked Is the Best Disguise (1974), as a work of literature all its own.
Even the most learned of Baker Street Irregulars will enjoy Sims’ look at the making of Sherlock Holmes.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-039-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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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