The lines that gleam are poignant reminders of a searing light now lost.
The late acclaimed novelist, short-story writer, playwright and memoirist begins with a return to Oxford University in 1961 and breaks off shortly after the death of his mother in 1965.
When he died in January 2011, Price (Ardent Spirits, 2009, etc.) had completed about two-thirds of this memoir (he had already chosen the title); his younger brother assembled the current volume and offers a grim afterword about Reynolds’ final rough months of debilitating pain in his wheelchair and bed. Price’s former student at Duke, novelist Anne Tyler, contributes a lovely foreword. The rough text is, of course, not polished. The early sections in particular (written from memory and from a diary he kept) are often superficial accounts of meals and socializing. But occasionally something piercing pokes through the surface. Price had hoped to rekindle an earlier relationship with a former lover, but the man let him know immediately that he was now with a woman. A bit later the author provides a star-struck but amusing account of a Roman meal and visit to the set of Cleopatra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Things pick up with Price’s return to the United States, where he lived for a while in the guesthouse of composer Samuel Barber, who was proposing a collaboration with Price on the libretto of a new opera for Leontyne Price. Price suggested using the Pocahontas story; Barber demurred. Price has some thoughts about his peers (e.g., John Updike and Philip Roth) and the JFK assassination, but emerging most strongly is his love of teaching, which he practiced for more than 50 years at Duke.
The lines that gleam are poignant reminders of a searing light now lost.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8349-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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