Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings...
The embodiment of revolution comes in for an appropriately anarchic—and wild, and thoroughly enjoyable—appreciation.
Fans of Mornington Crescent, a game of “complete and utter nonsense” that is more familiar to Brits than Americans, will be quite at home with blogger/editor/journalist/McSweeney’s regular Collins’s elegantly written but highly centrifugal treatment of what happened to Thomas Paine’s remains. “Any rube visiting Britain” is free to ask the rules of Mornington Crescent, observes Collins, but he is sure to be “methodically flummoxed with absurdly fake histories of the game and utter evasion as to its actual workings.” So it is with this masterpiece of misdirection, which opens at a gay bar in Manhattan on the site of which Paine died. A few beers later, Collins is chasing across the water, where William Cobbett, antinomian author of countless libertarian pamphlets, had spirited Paine’s bones. His skull a Yorick-like talisman for London radicals, Paine did yeoman service in the afterlife, but eventually, bits and pieces of his body went wandering off into the collections of vicars and natural philosophers—and as to just where, well, Collins asks and is flummoxed, and not just because all the high street house numbers have been changed since Georgian days. Confronted with failure, Collins takes delightful detours into the odd lives of the Victorian vegetarians and phrenologists and freethinkers who kept the Paine cult going as Paine himself was steadily forgotten in their day, a sad fate for an author whose Common Sense once sold second only to the Bible. The search takes Collins through dusty warrens and back alleys and rainy roads, all full of the promise of adventure; even a London bench “missing every single one of its slats” has a role in the great game that’s afoot.
Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings and conventions, is smiling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-502-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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