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OUT OF BABYLON

Name: OUT OF BABYLON
Author: Richard Grossinger
ISBN: 1-883319-57-9

GHOSTS OF GROSSINGER'S

by Richard Grossinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1997

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Grossinger (The Night Sky, 1981; Embryogenesis, 1985), an anthropologist by training, a cultural rebel by inclination, and supposed heir apparent to the great, eponymous Catskill resort by birth, presents an intense, personal story in the form of a ``nonfiction novel.'' (He is also the publisher of offbeat material, including this text.) Here's the first line of his coming-of-age memoir: ``The summer after he revealed himself to be my father, Uncle Paul arranged for me to visit him at Grossinger's.'' That revelation- -which was not necessarily true—is part of life as the scion of a truly dysfunctional family, at one time the Royal Family of the Borscht Belt. There is, perforce, a quick history of the rise and fall of the Versailles in the Catskills as the hotel gained land, lakes, and tummelers only to eventually lose everything. But there is more brooding angst and self-absorption in what evolves into the writer's ``vision-quest'' for a father, spiritual as well as genetic. Grossinger seems to have remembered or imagined every painful or instructive discourse in his life. He recounts old dreams, lists every college course in which he enrolled, and enumerates the courses he taught. Then there's the tarot, tai chi, and homeopathic studies; the poets and baseball heroes; the shamans and Edgar Cayce; the UFOs and monuments on Mars. There's a mean mother and a painfully troubled brother. Also recalled are multiple fathers and a phalanx of counterculture colleagues. Sometimes it seems like a conflation of I.B. Singer and Dickens. Often it sounds like a transcript from an analyst's couch. This isn't the memoir, full of schmaltz and rye bread, one might expect from the grandson of Jennie Grossinger. Still, it is a well-written personal story, ultimately sad and disquieting because it rings true. (illustrations) (Author tour; radio satellite tour)

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1997

ISBN: 1-883319-57-9

Page Count: 584

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997

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)