by Neil McKenna ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2005
Exhaustively documented, but ultimately reductive and incomplete.
A tedious slog through the English author’s sexual romps at the expense of his literary achievements.
Wilde’s “secret life” isn’t exactly secret anymore, but British journalist McKenna aims to chronicle, in salacious detail, his relations with every boy from the time he arrived at Oxford’s Magdalen College in 1874 through his imprisonment for “gross indecency” in 1895 and beyond. While reading classics at Oxford, the talented Irish poet was conflicted about his sexuality. His biographer charts Wilde’s growing enchantment with “Greek love” in the form of flirtations with choirboys, artist Frank Miles and his “sodomite” circle, and many others. His reading of and friendship with Walter Pater, who urged followers to “grasp at any exquisite passion,” helped convert Wilde to the Aesthetic Movement and the more “cultivated taste” of loving men. He also, however, attracted women, and his marriage seems to have been instigated by genuine feelings of love and protectiveness toward young Constance Lloyd, as well as the desire for some kind of stability to offset his erratic and dangerous cruising, blackmail by “rent boys,” and police raids of pick-up places. Becoming a father did not dissuade Wilde from “playing with fire”; he proclaimed in his letters a “daring manifesto of amorality” and wrote to one young lover, “I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience.” The dizzying parade of transient bedfellows ended only when he met the love of his life, young Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”), whose outraged father, the Marquis of Queensberry, eventually goaded Wilde into a libel suit and brought on his ruin. McKenna treats Wilde’s work secondhand and only as “autobiographical prefigurations” of his homoerotic double life. In this author’s hands, reading Wilde is reduced to a hunt for clues to his homosexuality; it’s as titillating but trivial as finding “indiscreetly inscribed cigarette cases given to young men.”
Exhaustively documented, but ultimately reductive and incomplete.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-04438-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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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