These five years' worth of Stevenson's letters fill up another two volumes of an intense and concentrated correspondence reflecting a short life. The period from 1879 to 1884 covers Stevenson's (The Collected Letters, Vols. I & II, p. 619) first literary successes (Treasure Island and A Child's Garden of Verses), the early phase of his marriage to American Fanny Osbourne, and the start of his lifelong search for better health. His correspondents during this time include Victorian literary lions Edmund Gosse, W.E. Henley, and J.A. Symonds, not to mention his new wife, his bohemian cousin Bob, and his anxious parents. Less useful for direct biographical or critical information than as a partial reflection of his personal life, Stevenson's letters are carefully modulated to each recipient's mood and character. To his friends, he dispensed jokes about his shaky health and nascent writing career, about which in turn he would have to reassure his parents in calm reports; and while his friends tried to accustom themselves to his new American wife, he and Fanny wrote joint letters to his parents to introduce them to her. His preferred epistolary embellishments in these volumes are doggerel verse (particularly about his parodic man of letters, C.G. Brash), passages in broad Scots, and fantastic handwriting and doodles. His subjects are always more prosaic than what's portrayed in his books (even his rasher ventures in California come across as less interesting than he made them in The Amateur Emigrant, Travels with a Donkey, and Silverado Squatters). By the fourth volume, between his search for essay material and exchanges with Henley over the editorial value of the latter's magazine, Stevenson gradually began to sharpen the aesthetic opinions that would inform his friendship with Henry James and his later work. (For a biography of Stevenson in this issue, see p. 1339.) Consistently entertaining, whether from a transcontinental railway car, a sickbed in France, or an overcrowded writing desk.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-06187-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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