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SARAH VALENTINE, NO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Name: SARAH VALENTINE, NO GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Author: Philip Valentine Coates
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6540-1

PART ONE

by Philip Valentine Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2016

A relentlessly downbeat account, but the author still manages to bring his ancestors’ stories to life.

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Coates makes his debut with a comprehensive biography of his great-great-grandmother—a long narrative that’s as much a history of a time and place as it is of a family legacy.

This first volume of a planned trilogy covers the first 18 years of Sarah Valentine’s life. She was born in the East End slums of London in 1819, the first child of Jim and Sarah Valentine. Three years later, her brother Jimmy was born, followed by several additional siblings. Most survived, but two didn’t—and that was just the start of a chain of tragedies that would plague the family. The abject poverty of the district, which Coates describes here so vividly, is barely imaginable today: several families sharing a single room, sewage spilling from overflowing privies in courtyards and alleys, children wearing threadbare clothing and walking the streets barefoot in the winter, no heat, no food, and polluted water (children were frequently given ale to drink, as it was safer). When Sarah was 8, she joined a pack of thieves and pickpockets, which was made up of destitute children. She would return home late at night, drunk and defiant. Eventually, when she was about 12, her parents decided they could no longer control or care for her, and they placed her in the Shoreditch Workhouse. Sarah would find herself in and out of that workhouse over the years. Coates has clearly done his research in this book, and its pages are filled with minutiae, such as street and tavern names, as well as rambling dissertations on the growth of slums in London. Much of this will be of interest to historians, and there are enticing tidbits that readers can pick up along the way; for example, the author notes that men’s trouser zippers didn’t come into fashion until later in the Victorian era—they were frowned upon as causing improper focus on the male anatomy. However, there’s too much repetition of horrid, depressing conditions, which are well-established upfront. The excessive detail sometimes distracts from the compelling, heartbreaking story, which will make readers anxious to get back to the characters.

A relentlessly downbeat account, but the author still manages to bring his ancestors’ stories to life.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6540-1

Page Count: 280

Publisher: AuthorHouseUK

Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)