Of some interest to exploration buffs, though less so than Martin Dugard’s recent Into Africa (p. 202).
Harem girl to renowned explorer to Edwardian dowager: the improbable life of “a lady of mystery.”
Barbara Maria Szasz, a Hungarian Transylvanian, was born around 1845. Whether out of financial need or some other reason, her parents placed her in a Turkish harem at the age of four. No dark fate that: as Shipman (The Man Who Found the Missing Link, 2001, etc.) writes, channeling the voice of African explorer Sam Baker, “Growing up in a harem was rather like attending a convent school.” Ten years later, now renamed Florenz, our young heroine was put up for sale in an “elite white slave auction,” where Sam Baker and his faithful Sikh companion Duleep Singh happened to be passing by when the harem-keeper Ali put her on the block. Happily, Ali accepted Baker’s bid against that of the local boss: writes Shipman, now in Ali’s voice, “I cannot send you to the pasha. . . . He is a wicked man, selfish and cruel, and you would hate him. You are going with the Englishman.” Morally opposed to slavery but apparently not opposed to romancing a 14-year-old, Baker took Florence, for so she was now called, off to exotic venues such as Bucharest and Alexandria, where “they drank and ate and laughed their way through the night.” The venues got less romantic when Sam resumed his long passion for African exploration, and then Florence’s knowledge of Arabic and her fearlessness came in handy as they combed the African Great Lakes for secondary sources of the Nile. A good story, but the narrative suffers from cuteness: Shipman’s habit of dramatizing the undramatic with invented dialogue (“Sam has brought me the only freedom, the greatest love, and the most lasting contentment of my life. . . . There is no point in living if he is gone”) makes for often tedious reading.
Of some interest to exploration buffs, though less so than Martin Dugard’s recent Into Africa (p. 202).Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-050555-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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