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THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

Name: THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Author: Nancy Bachrach
ISBN: 978-0-307-27090-0

A MEMOIR

by Nancy Bachrach ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2009

With smart, subtle prose, Bachrach limns a journey toward love that feels fresh, organic and as unpredictable as life itself.

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A sophisticated, funny debut about growing up with a manic mother and coming to terms with a fatal family accident.

Bachrach was in Paris launching a hopeless antiperspirant ad campaign when her brother called with the news that their father Mort was dead and that their mother Lola was in a coma. The couple had spent the night on their docked boat, Mr. Fix It, breathing in carbon monoxide from a generator incorrectly repaired by Mort. Lola, who slept near a leaky porthole that provided a stream of oxygen, was still alive but not expected to pull through. Told to prepare herself for a double funeral, Bachrach wondered how she would do that: “Pack two of everything? Pack clothes that are very black?” The author’s humor is acerbic, rich with allusion and beautifully timed. She describes her mother, pre-coma, theatrically imparting the vision that Lola was the center of the universe and everyone else revolved around her: “She is Salome, stripping the veil off the face of the cosmos. She is my mother, Lola Hornstein. And she is crazy.” Bachrach returned to Providence to aid her siblings, a piano-playing surgeon and an art-therapy professor. Mort’s funeral was packed. “My father on his own would have been a so-so draw,” she writes, “but this crowd thought they were coming for a double bill.” Instead, Lola awoke, but as a sedated, babbling version of the brilliant, electrically energetic woman who raised them. Bachrach rooted for her mother to overcome the doctors’ diagnoses of permanent brain damage, but she was carrying around some bitterness from a quirky childhood, and intermittent flashbacks make it easy to see why. Lola’s manic episodes weren’t unique; the family history was rife with mad geniuses.

With smart, subtle prose, Bachrach limns a journey toward love that feels fresh, organic and as unpredictable as life itself.

Pub Date: May 4, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-307-27090-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)