by Michael Thorn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 1994
Compared with Peter Levi's learned, insightful Tennyson (p. 1370), Thorn's life of the poet is journalistic—a series of short, anecdotal chapters devoted to tableaux or gossip—and is, despite its fast pace, out of tune with the character and achievement of his subject. The Tennyson revealed by British scholar Thorn is a popular poet whose lyrics, romances, and even his elegiac epic, In Memoriam, reflected the tastes and values of his readership. While elitist critics of the time dismissed Tennyson as childish, superficial, morbid, or sentimental, he was, Thorn emphasizes, the voice of Victorian England. On a personal level, he was haunted by his bleak and disordered childhood in a country rectory—and by drinking, madness, violence, insanity, melancholy, and an adolescence that extended until 1850, when, at age 40, he became poet laureate, married, and transformed his eccentricities— hypochondria, vulgar manners, excessive drinking and smoking, and bizarre costumes including a huge cape and wizard's hat—into something incidental and colorful. As for the gossip about his homosexuality, opium-addiction, womanizing, and epilepsy: Thorn presents it, however irrelevant, refuting some rumors and dismissing the rest as superfluous color in an already vivid life. In place of the subtle intellectual insights of Levi—the dignity of his Tennyson—Thorn offers some ``laughable bathos'' about Tennyson at home, beset by dental problems, marital rifts, and other petty problems that, the author points out, he shared with his readership. And in place of the vision, imagination, and vocation of Levi's Tennyson, Thorn refers to a ``poetic impulse'' that needed a ``kickstart.'' Levi and Thorn both recognize the disparity between the child and the man, the public and the private life—between the poetry and the person—but neither undertakes the psychological analysis that would relate them into a whole. Affable, familiar, sentimental—in fact, rather like Tennyson's worst reputation: popular, simplified, an impersonation rather than a representation. Read the Levi instead.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10414-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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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