Remarkable characters and rich historical details make this an illuminating portrait of a titanic man and a vanishing rural...
Based on childhood reminiscences, this debut memoir about a boy’s adventures in backwoods North Carolina as the son of a wealthy bootlegger in the 1960s and ’70s transcends mere tribute.
Opening with his father’s rise from rural poverty to near-feudal wealth as a moonshine bootlegger during Prohibition (and his subsequent control of thousands of acres near Clayton, N.C.), Sullivan’s memoir is as much a portrait of the rural, post-Reconstruction South as it’s a portrayal of the infamous bootleg king Percy Flowers or a boy’s awakening to an adult world. Rich in cultural and historical detail—e.g., Flowers was called “the most notorious moonshiner in all of the United States” by the Saturday Evening Post in 1958—Sullivan draws on recollection and research to vividly evoke his biological father and his own family life, including Curry, the author’s cuckolded father; Bea, his practical mother; and Reno, a canny, African-American bootlegger. These portraits are too cursory to rise to the level of great characters, but the details of time and place—the slaughter of hogs, the stoking of a whiskey still, the wood-fired curing using tobacco sticks—are often riveting. Sullivan has a keen eye for poignant irony—noting, for example, that Percy’s legitimate family line died out despite his lifelong devotion to perfecting the bloodlines of his hounds. Regrettably, clumsy structural devices undercut the book’s considerable strengths: The memoir is structured using a series of italicized letters by the author to his own two sons; the letters are intercut among roman chapters, and handwritten pull quotes from these letters are inserted like illustrations to highlight principle lessons he would have them learn (e.g., “With faith, you have a basis for belonging and a foundation for living”). These elements distract from the compelling story of Flowers’ rise and fall, as does frequent repetition of information.
Remarkable characters and rich historical details make this an illuminating portrait of a titanic man and a vanishing rural South.Pub Date: May 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482346671
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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