A Guide Bleu for the literary armchair.
A delightfully aimless, somewhat rueful collection of nine essays on places visited and friends lost.
Novelist/memoirist Delbanco (The Lost Suitcase, 2000, etc.; Writing/Univ. of Michigan) is a writer’s writer, always in search of a fresh story, turn of phrase, or book to read—indeed you can read his essays in great part for the gallery of titles he lists in each. He titles his own collection after a phrase from Baudelaire (“n’importe où hors du monde”) and begins with an old-fashioned defense of imitation as “the route—not perhaps the only route, but a well-traveled one—to originality.” Writing, he believes, is an act of discovery, recounting everything from the epic movement of people to a personal transformation. In the eponymous essay, Delbanco regrets the “wide-eyed and improvisational” style of such intrepid early travel writers as Marco Polo or Mary Kingsley, who truly ventured out to discover terra incognita. By contrast, he finds, modern travel writing has more to do with recovery: “the writer reports on information gained or innocence long lost.” Modeling himself after the earlier form in “Letter from Namibia,” Delbanco recounts a visit he made as a young man in the late 1960s to an isolated African farm, diligently cataloguing the plethora of curious animals, the daily workings of the farm, and the personalities he met. “Northern Lights” ambles through literature by writers such as Dinesen, Conrad, and Nabokov, who found their voices by delving into raw and unfamiliar worlds. “The Dead” contains cameo appearances by several deceased mates; Delbanco describes his friendship with writer John Gardner, as well as a hilarious 1973 luncheon with James Baldwin and his flamboyant entourage in Provence. “On Daniel Martin” is a close reading of John Fowles’s novel, while “Strange Type” meditates on the richly ambivalent meanings offered by inadvertently transposed letters. Overall, the collection makes up in quirkiness what it lacks in cohesion.
A Guide Bleu for the literary armchair.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-231-13384-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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