A series of travel notes that fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
An American traveler shares his notes of times abroad.
In his debut memoir, Bermann treats his readers to 10 years of sallies to spots far from his Houston hometown, places such as Colombia, Kenya, and the Philippines. Bermann tells of carrying bottles of alcohol effortlessly through airport security, flirting with attractive women the world over, and endeavoring to make the most of his time away from home. His accounts of many conversations with strangers along the way show him to be a friendly, easygoing sort, as happy to share jokes on the deck of a boat as he is to snorkel with the sharks beneath it. The author is also an avid sports fan, and his account is most absorbing when he describes the many baseball games that he’s traveled to see (“The Boston Red Sox did most of the good things,” he writes of an All-Star game at Yankee Stadium, “but they were booed anyway”). Bermann is a talented sportsman, and he reprints a pageslong passage from his friend Finn Aagaard’s 1992 book Aagaard’s Africa, which describes how Bermann felled a Cape buffalo with a single shot. Bermann’s own detailed prose convincing makes his journeys seem desirable. However, the book often reads like a series of disconnected jottings. Because the text has no proper introduction, readers are left to piece together for themselves who different people are, what prompted several trips, and, in some cases, even what took place. For example, one anecdote about Belize “cave tubing”—traveling through caves in large, inflatable inner tubes—reads, nearly in full, “We had a guide that took us through the caves. After that, we headed back.” What did the caves look like? A few paragraphs later, the author tells of being joined by some young men on a boat: “They carried on about a lot of things that we all got a good laugh over.” What was so funny? Overall, the book fails to take into account such details, which mars a potentially worthy account.
A series of travel notes that fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.Pub Date: March 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-5350-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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