This workmanlike biography is a welcome fleshing out of a writer still largely known for just one of her books, the pioneering lesbian apologia The Well of Loneliness. Cambridge University scholar Cline (Women, Passion and Celibacy, 1994, etc.) gives Hall (18801943) her due by devoting equal attention to her other works, which in her own time made her a broadly admired writer with a fairly unadventurous style. Hall was a prize-winning novelist (and a poet whose sentimental verses were set to music and became popular anthems) long before she set out to explain the sexual ``inversion'' of women to a heterosexual audience. When The Well of Loneliness came around in 1928, however, Hall was very much in the vanguard in theme, if not in form. Cline's strength lies not so much in psychological insight on Hall herself as in the elucidation of the sexual issues—and more general themes such as the experience of the outsider, courage and spiritual searching—that governed Hall's life and writing. Many of these themes—varying speculations on the nature of homosexuality, the subversion of gender norms—have become familiar, but Cline very vividly portrays an era when they were thrilling discoveries daringly lived out by individual pioneers like Hall herself and the wide cast of colorful characters Cline assembles. The independently wealthy Hall moved in racy circles with the likes of Violet Hunt and Tallulah Bankhead; her longtime partner, Una Troubridge, was the wife of an admiral, whose social company had run to Churchills and Asquiths. Cline limns the polymorphous existence of lesbianism among different classes of women over Hall's lifetime, from a late Victorian tolerance of intimate female ``friendship'' to the harsh moralistic attacks on The Well of Loneliness. Apart from its valuable contribution to the study of lesbian literature per se, this biography dramatizes through Hall's life the complex and still often surprising sexual politics of the early century. (16 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-87951-831-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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