Engaging bits about intriguing lands, all in service of trying to “understand the complexities of the world.”
An American expatriate now living in Singapore explores the world between and beyond borders, where the notion of nationalism becomes complicated.
As the author of a dozen or so books and an academic within a number of writing programs, Hemley (A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, 2012, etc.) has crossed the borders between fiction and nonfiction and established himself as an internationalist. His latest is a travel book of sorts but not one aimed at tourists. In “Mr. Chen’s Mountain,” the author invokes an old saying: “If you spend a day in China you can write a book; if you spend a month, you can write an article; if you spend a year, you can’t write anything.” This chapter, one of the book’s most provocative and engaging, chronicles the story of a megawealthy man whose character and wealth resist easy understanding or categorization. The author compares his subject to both Citizen Kane and Jed Clampett, but with a twist on the latter. “What makes him remarkable is that he’s not the Jed Clampett who moved to Beverly Hills but the [one] who returned home,” where his wealth towers in stark contrast to the poverty he left behind. Because many of the chapters were previously published—in the New York Observer, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere—the narrative doesn’t always cohere, and some of the complexities of border rivalries and histories can be difficult to apprehend quickly. However, this may be an element of Hemley’s overall theme about how lands can change allegiances and alliances many times without the natives themselves changing. “Governments are necessary, and it’s natural to want to consider oneself part of something larger,” he writes. “But I’ve never been fully convinced that nations as such make sense.” Among other topics, the author explores the Falkland Islands, Hong Kong, and the fraught border between India and Bangladesh.
Engaging bits about intriguing lands, all in service of trying to “understand the complexities of the world.”Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4962-2041-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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