Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and...
Novelist/memoirist Johnson (Perfect Together, 1991, etc.) revisits Century City, Culver City, and New York City in the days when bicoastal travel meant riding The Chief or The Twentieth Century and the movies starred quick-witted women and well-groomed men speaking clever dialogue.
A lot of that dialogue was scripted by Nunnally Johnson, a dominant Hollywood writer/producer as well as the author’s father. So what would it be like, you ask, coming of age in Hollywood’s Golden Age? In glorious black and white, Johnson recalls little Shirley Temple and Roddy McDowell, the pools, the croquet games, the gossip of The Business in the summers with Pop. Winters in New York with Mom involved the Gorgon School with Tony Perkins, Old Golds, cocktail shakers, Peck & Peck, and “coming out”—in a more innocent time when that had nothing to do with your sexual orientation and everything to do with debutante balls. East or West, once the war was over, Johnson endured teenage parties and the rigors of dating. She sailed to Europe on the Queen Mary and flew home into Idlewild. Johnson’s flashback includes friends like frosty Gregory, anorexic Julie, and Don Sweetheart (yes, that’s his real name). The cast includes Betty and Bogey, Smith classmate Sylvia Plath, and colorful stepparents. Her memory piece’s best-drawn portraits are Hollywood Pop, he of three wives and four children, and New York Mom. It’s all terribly dramatic, but why not? Nunnally advised his daughter to think of herself “not as Schrafft’s but as ‘21’,”and so she does. She trots out the grand old motifs of teenage angst, money, and sex—the latter problem temporarily solved when she finally does it. The book ends with Nora’s marriage and the prospect of settlement in an Aramco post in the Arabian desert. It seems more installments are due.
Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and good company on the red-eye or the beach.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3447-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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