Old leopard, new spots, groomed by an acolyte.
If you’re looking for some tyrant-exalting text but for whatever reason are made uncomfortable by the rhetorical (and practical) excesses of, say, Hitler or Mao—well, this is your ticket.
Books by dictators tend to the hortatory: Together you and I can solve the problem; together we’ll lead the world; together we’ll destroy those pesky people next door. Oops. Scratch that last one, for, says The Leader, “All peoples shall have right to existence.” Except, maybe, the people who live in Tel Aviv. Moreover, “The members of Jamahiriyan society”—that is, those who live in sort-of-socialist Libya—“are liberated from any feudalism.” Except, maybe, the slaves who travel across the Libyan Sahara, whose paths are far from The Guide’s green coastline. All of this is the usual cult-of-personality stuff with some curious twists, as when Gaddafi muses on a future that belongs to “the black race,” save that the blacks are “backward” and “sluggish in a climate which is always hot,” and when he assures his gentle readers that “to ignore natural differences between man and woman and mix their roles is . . . hostile to the laws of nature, destructive to human life, and a genuine cause for the wretchedness of human social life.” Once fond of funding people who blew up other people, Gaddafi is now our friend—or so assures French political scientist and hagiographer Jouve, who wonders, “Who is this man who, after making the world tremble with fear, now arouses respect and even praise?” No small amount of that praise comes from the professor himself, who has known Gaddafi for a long time and wants us to know that “his charisma is such that it electrifies his audience,” which makes it all the more tragic that anyone should have ever doubted him.
Old leopard, new spots, groomed by an acolyte.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-129-0
Page Count: 262
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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