A witty, often endearing throwaway memoir of a young musician's professional coming-of-age in the '60s and early '70s. Lankford discovered his vocation at age 13, upon seeing his first live rock 'n' roll band. Soon he had managed to persuade his baleful mother to let him take out a loan and buy a drum kit, and after the standard period of godawful-racket-making, he joined a succession of garage bands in his Oklahoma hometown. Lankford captures the ludicrous joys and irrational woes of membership in a rock band. In one very funny set piece, the author describes in devastating detail his disastrous first and only attempt to sing lead: ``Dancers became paralyzed and clumsy, faces rigid. A certain wide-eyed unfocused look swept the room like a fog. Suddenly, everyone was just going through the motions, pretending to dance, pretending to smile, pretending to be there.'' After a stint in a band with significant local renown, Lankford got a call from a tiny blues combo passing through town whose drummer had quit suddenly. He wound up touring the country with the two veteran musicians for two years, playing invariably ratty dives and reaping the benefits of his bandmates' decades of musical and life experience. Lankford tells some excellent road stories, from hauling a wounded pheasant into the van (``I'm going to eat him,'' explains Dennis, the organist and driver) to breaking down during a South Dakota blizzard while searching for a town called Deadwood. In addition to witnessing much drunkenness and one murder, the author tried heroin once under the tutelage of the group's guitarist. The emotional and physical wear of this kind of touring drove Lankford out of the business entirely by age 23. Very likable, but essentially a string of anecdotes that don't cohere into anything larger.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8118-0683-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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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