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NONCONFORMITY

Name: NONCONFORMITY
Author: Nelson Algren
ISBN: 1-888363-05-3

WRITING ON WRITING

by Nelson Algren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 1996

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A previously unpublished work from the author of The Man With the Golden Arm and other masterful portraits of the seamy underside of urban America. This volume, essentially a lengthy essay in book form, was written by Algren in the early 1950s, at the peak of his fame and the height of the McCarthy era. At the time, his lengthy affair with Simone de Beauvoir was coming to an unhappy end and he was throwing himself into the public arena in reaction to that private pain. Nonconformity shows its origins in those multiple traumas. Opening with a brief and mournful recollection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's ``crack-up,'' Algren jumps into a passionate defense of the writer as someone who must live out the emotions of his characters, no easy thing in an era in which all the forces of the state and the market seem to be calculated to produce conformist writing that commits nothing, dares nothing, and achieves nothing. It is a time, he writes repeatedly, in which Americans are caught ``between the H bomb and the A,'' with the threat of internal destruction greater than any threat from the so-called Red Menace. At such a time, Algren says defiantly, a writer's attitude to his readers should be ``this ain't what you rung for, Jack—but it's what you're damned well getting.'' That's certainly the mind-set that dominated Algren's best writing. The afterword and notes by Simon are useful, placing the essay in a larger biographical and historical context. However, the editor's claim that this is ``Algren's only book-length work of non-fiction'' is dubious; Algren also turned out two substantial travel books and an essay of similar length on his native Chicago, each of them filled with the same corrosive writing on the American scene. That said, this is a typically refreshing breath of cigarette-smoke-filled air from one of our most underrated writers, angry and funny as Algren usually is.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1996

ISBN: 1-888363-05-3

Page Count: 144

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TEXAS STORIES OF NELSON ALGREN
by Nelson Algren

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA EATS
by Nelson Algren

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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)