This sluggish memoir devoutly details the mechanics of fly- fishing, but much else in the narrative remains bewilderingly vague. Only in the last chapter does Patterson reveal that it's been 20 years since he left his London ad agency job to go fishing. He moved into an attic room at the Big House, owned by the mysterious Lady McFarlane, near The Hollow, a flyfishing ``beat'' on a stream that flows into the Thames. Although he never provides a clear, specific name for the stream, almost every other location is given a capitalized nickname: the Back of Beyond, the Mad House, the Doctor's Cottage, Snowdrop Land. People suffer a similar fate: His ``very best fishing companion'' is dubbed Roll Cast because of his adeptness; a man in a horizontally striped shirt becomes Picasso; a retired professor of ancient history is the Greek Bust. There's also the Steel Guitar and the River God. (His wife goes unnamed; perhaps she's the Big Mum referred to in the dedication.) The Boss, a talkative man who ``had lived in The Hollow for ever,'' is a ``riverkeeper'' who oversees a 32-mile stretch of the stream. Patterson rented the attic room for five years before buying an old stable and converting it into a fishing lodge. There are some mildly interesting bits, such as the local legend about the ghost of the trench-coat-garbed riverkeeper who died in a shooting accident and the strange saga of the old door Patterson found and installed at Wild Wood Lodge. Aficionados may appreciate his expertise and the tying of flies: ``For the tail I use a tuft of yellow polypropylene yarn. It's got neutral density. . . .'' Too tedious and irritating for even the most avid of anglers. (more than 300 line drawings)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-425-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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