Wonderful American social history and lots of fun.
He truly had cojones: Dr. John Brinkley became fabulously wealthy in the 1920s and ‘30s by inserting goat testicles into herds of men anxious about their manliness.
Easily outfitted with a diploma from the “Bennett Eclectic Medical College,” Brinkley had more than a decade of quackery behind him when he was forced by poverty to settle down temporarily with a desultory practice in Milford, Kan. Then one day an exhausted farmer, concerned about the working order of his privates, expressed a fancy for “billy goat nuts.” Eureka! The doctor fulfilled his wish. It was the genesis of the age of rejuvenation by gonad implantation. The testicular repairman had his finger on the pulse of America’s organic members, and he made a splendid fortune. Imitators multiplied at home and abroad. Brinkley ran for governor of Kansas and began to notice “the resemblance between himself and the Son of God.” To spread the good news, particularly of his profitable nostrums and medical manhandling, the bunkum medico operated a radio station just south of the Texas border, conveniently beyond the reach of the Federal Radio Commission and its “fuddy-duddy regulations.” No matter what all those on-air testimonials claimed, the results were not good. Rejection and infection made Brinkley a mass murderer. His license was revoked and he lost the ball game. The winner was the AMA’s redoubtable Dr. Morris Fishbein, associate of notables like Sinclair Lewis, Eugene Debs and H.L. Mencken, and himself a force of nature. With sprightly style, Brock (Indiana Gothic: A Story of Adultery and Murder in an American Family, 1999) exposes the randy rise of a master huckster and his fall at the hands of a relentless quack hunter. It’s a fine account of medical fakery, congenital scientific stupidity and the habitual human appetite for being fooled and exploited.
Wonderful American social history and lots of fun.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-33988-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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