Needs more rigorous identification of what is fact, what is fancy.
Highly impressionistic memoir by an African-American woman who grew up in Colorado, where she experienced poverty, racism and the tough love of her irascible but devoted aunt.
Williams’s narrative strategies invite considerable skepticism. Though her father, an able carpenter and builder, ran off when she was two, she remembers just how he mixed concrete, how deftly he swung a hammer. She relates many incidents from her youth in pages of verbatim dialogue. Readers may well wonder how much here is remembered, how much imagined. The prose, by contrast, is decidedly unimaginative: Style and vocabulary are unremarkable, the diction often trite (“two shakes of a lamb’s tail”), and the similes strained (one woman’s anomalous beauty reminds the author of “a cantaloupe vine growing in a compost heap”). The author begins with a visit to see Aunt Daisy, now in her 90s, who at 21 married 79-year-old Civil War veteran Robert Ball Anderson. Williams then supplies more family history before launching into her personal story. After her mother died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning (an event whose aftermath is related in “remembered” dialogue), four-year-old Rita went to live near Steamboat Springs with Daisy. Her aunt taught the author about the outdoors, hard work, fishing, slaughtering lambs, raising goslings, poverty, dignity and discipline (she neither spared the rod nor spoiled the child). Rita was bright and curious; she loved reading and the arts and got to take some courses at a local arts camp where Daisy cleaned. As Williams tells it, she bounced around from school to school, questioned religion, endured racism overt and covert and eventually headed off to college. Along the way there is attempted suicide and rape, the latter occurring right after the author hears Dylan sing “The Times They Are A’Changin’.”
Needs more rigorous identification of what is fact, what is fancy.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101154-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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