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MY FATHER AT 100

Name: MY FATHER AT 100
Author: Ron Reagan
ISBN: 978-0-670-02259-5

A MEMOIR

by Ron Reagan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 2011

“He was easy to love but hard to know,” writes the author, who disagreed with his father politically but loved him avidly....

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Ronald Reagan’s son seeks to understand his father by researching his formative years.

“He was easy to love but hard to know,” writes the author, who disagreed with his father politically but loved him avidly. After the former president’s death in 2004, Ron visited the locales, mostly in Illinois, where his father grew up, graduated from high school and completed college. His insights are admittedly speculative yet never outlandish. Ron, a political commentator for MSNBC, writes clearly and does not fall into the trap of inflating his role in his father's world. The author explains that although 90 percent of his father's thoughts and actions have been chronicled more or less fully, the remaining 10 percent requires explication. After all, President Reagan, as Hollywood actor and politician, was inscrutable to the point of wonderment among his family members, friends and professional advisors. Of the already published writings, the author credits Edmund Morris’ Dutch (1999) as the most successful in capturing Reagan’s elusive nature. It turns out, from the youngest child's perspective, that the president was as advertised: naturally sunny, without guile, devoid of cynicism, expert at creating his own worldview by reformulating his childhood experiences, turning cinema experiences into an ersatz reality and frequently invoking denial when unpleasant scenarios loomed. Toward the end of the book, the author shifts from genealogical researcher to you-are-there narrator, particularly as he recounts the assassination attempt on his father and the already elderly man's swift recovery from a nearly fatal bullet entry. Ron's recounting of the post-presidential decline because of dementia is honest and compelling, whatever the reader's assessment of the White House years.

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-670-02259-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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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)