While the book occasionally lacks direction, readers will find comfort in the fact that Victorian stories are usually...
Two stories intersect 150 years apart in this unusual historical memoir.
Completing her doctorate in Victorian literature, Stevens (Bleaker House, 2017, etc.) chose to focus on the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, a close friend of Charlotte Brontë who was tasked with writing her biography. Studying Gaskell with uninhibited obsession, she quickly noticed the parallels between her life and that of her subject. “I had never encountered a writer who could fill a page so entirely with herself….I was caught up in her life almost instantly,” writes Stevens. Just as Gaskell’s book, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was due for publication, she escaped to Rome to avoid any criticism of her work. Ultimately, Gaskell’s book “took two years to write and more pain and worry than you could possibly have anticipated. There were so many people to insult….There were so many people, you said, whom you wanted to libel.” In the process, Gaskell met the love of her life, the notorious critic Charles Eliot Norton. This escape was a trigger for Stevens, who, in 2013, began devouring her letters and imagining what her life must have been like. Meanwhile, Stevens was also dealing with her one true love, Max, who was elusive and reluctant to own up to his feelings. Stevens weaves a text that oscillates between the late 1850s and the mid-2000s, systemically identifying parallels between her and Gaskell’s respective romantic lives and underlining the different roles women played in these two very different societies. Though the result is an interesting and beautifully written contrast, the intention behind the book remains unclear, and readers may feel adrift at certain points.
While the book occasionally lacks direction, readers will find comfort in the fact that Victorian stories are usually entertaining, and Stevens knows how to tell her own with literary punch.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54350-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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