The ambivalent autobiography of the man whose father, Peter Tompkins, cowrote The Secret Life of Plants and other infamous works of the '70s. As a child influenced by his father's circle and its predilection for occult literature, the younger Tompkins (This Tree Grows Out of Hell, not reviewed) was steeped in the teachings of a path to knowledge referred to as the Akashic record. With the runaway success of The Secret Life in 1973, not only money but an ever-growing stream of unusual (i.e., weird) visitors began pouring into the Tompkins domicile. The memoir (of which a part appeared in Harper's) is best in its details, from a young person's perspective, of the brave new world Tompkins Sr. tried to create. This included bringing his lover, Betty, home as a permanent member of the household. In this element of his great plan to leave behind the ``suffocating blanket of prohibitions and inhibitions'' characteristic of modern life, his wife was relegated to a second bed in her son's room. When Betty died from cancer while Ptolemy was in his 20s, he came to realize that the adults probably didn't harbor exceptional powers after all. The last third or so of the book skips ahead to August 1995, when Tompkins, now adrift and in his 30s, visits his parents in West Virginia in order to escape New York and a heroin habit, only to fall back into heavy drinking and pill consumption. His eventual decision to seek out help and his revovery are mercifully telegraphed but not detailed. Tompkins's self-portrait presents a figure still suffering from the same millennarian fever that afflicted his dad, but who thus far has made less of his gifts than the man—buffoon or sage, take your pick—whose peculiar life and accomplishments give this memoir its primary interest. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-380-97438-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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