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SCRAPING BY IN THE BIG EIGHTIES

A palatable history lesson, by turns funny, stern, and often sad.

The charmingly personal becomes the mightily political in a muscular, well-wrought series of essays that move chronologically through an appalling decade of public and private self-indulgence.

Singer (English/St. Lawrence Univ.) was 22 in 1980 and “ready to let the transcendence begin” when this brand-new Northwestern graduate moved to Seattle with boyfriend Joe. Her plan was to get laid off and become an “evolved human,” except that Ronald Reagan was about to be elected, ushering in a war on big government and a “crisis of faith in Team America.” Singer’s younger self, the first-person protagonist of these essays, worked hand to mouth in restaurants, at an emerging HMO dubbed Group Death, and in an under-the-table hippie sweat shop assembling jewelry boxes, observing with cunning eyes the unfolding of the decade’s horrors. “Voodoo economics” (a phrase coined by the elder George Bush), which accompanied Reagan’s huge escalation in the Pentagon budget with drastic under-funding of social services, to the author meant cutbacks in the mental-health care required by her unstable and increasingly dangerous mother back in Cleveland. Singer nails the advent of televangelists and other desperate religious strivings with her account of a visit to Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s holy state outside of Antelope, Oregon, in the essay “Shelter.” She chronicles her newly yuppie friends’ transformation into Ollie North clones and her own resemblance to “scary babe” Fawn Hall. The crises of AIDS, Chernobyl, and the Challenger explosion are all couched within Singer’s own personal toils: heartbreaks, abortions, head wounds from a bicycle accident. “How I Survived the Crash” finds a metaphor for the country’s lack of “structural integrity” in an account of shopping for a bra with her mother in Northampton, Massachusetts. Singer has certainly done her homework for this entertaining refresher course on the decade of big hair and small mercies: the acknowledgments alone offer an excellent bibliography of an era that many readers who lived through it would rather forget.

A palatable history lesson, by turns funny, stern, and often sad.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2004

ISBN: 0-8032-4309-X

Page Count: 244

Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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INTO THE WILD

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.

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)

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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