A warmhearted testimony of gratitude and humility.
A prolific writer reflects on his commitment to his craft.
Essayist, novelist, playwright, and English professor Rosenblatt gathers a sampling from his 40-year writing career that reveals the “exhilaration and exasperation” of the work that has long engaged him: “I write simply because I am enthralled with the writer’s life, mad for it, and with the act of writing.” Among the pieces are excerpts—some as short as a paragraph—from longer works, such as his memoirs Kayak Morning (“Writing makes sorrow endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible”), The Boy Detective, Making Toast, and the unpublished Unaccompanied Minor; his mock instruction book Rules for Aging (nobody is “denigrating your work behind your back,” he promises); essays from previous collections, such as Anything Can Happen; pieces that appeared in newspapers and literary journals; and selections from published and unpublished novels and plays. One essay specifically on craft comes from his writing companion Unless It Moves the Human Heart, but not all pieces concern writing directly. Rosenblatt discloses, for example, his mother’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease; praises a teacher from whom he learned to “look at the world with wonder and pleasure”; and describes an image, recalled from childhood, of seeing a young woman weeping on stone steps in Columbus Circle. Even though he knows that using a word processor would make life easier for his publishers, he prefers to compose on a yellow legal notepad and transcribe his work on an electric typewriter. “Editors never question why they must put my materials into the system for me,” he writes. “They have simply found it expedient to adapt to my strangeness, mainly because I have never indicated that I would adapt to them.” Appreciative of sound and cadence, Rosenblatt has always been nourished by poets. Sometimes nostalgic, even sad, he regrets that although he has not “eradicated world poverty” or “put an end to injustice, or even to casual cruelty,” he has given the world a singular bequest: love.
A warmhearted testimony of gratitude and humility.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-885983-78-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
