Jean Rio’s is an interesting life, but Denton’s fourth outing disappoints.
Award-winning author Denton (American Massacre, 2003, etc.), who’s written widely on the American West, tells the story of her great-great-grandmother, a Mormon pioneer.
A well-heeled Victorian Englishwoman, Jean Rio Griffiths found herself dissatisfied with the staid ways of the Church of England. When in 1848 Jean Rio and her husband met Mormon missionary John Taylor, they were captivated by his message, and in 1849 they were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Just months later, Jean Rio’s husband died, and in 1851 the widow took her seven children to America to join the Mormons in Utah. Jean Rio was ultimately disappointed by the church—she loathed polygamy, she was horrified by the 1857 massacre, when Mormons slaughtered a train-full of “Gentile” pioneers, and she couldn’t tolerate the Mormons’ acceptance of widespread poverty. Eventually, she left and moved to California. The strength of Denton’s biography lies in her eye for detail: for example, in the description of Jean Rio’s grand piano, the first to make it by wagon to the intermountain West, or the mention of the ox that died because he ingested Indian war paint. The book is filled with riveting vignettes, like the stories of Jean Rio’s mother’s escape as a baby from Revolutionary France to Scotland and of Jean Rio’s daughter-in-law’s migration from Denmark to Utah. Denton, however, fails to establish herself as an entirely trustworthy narrator. Granted, impartial writing about Mormonism is rare. But while the tale here isn’t wildly sensationalistic, neither is it entirely evenhanded. Denton speaks of Jean Rio’s being “seduced” by the story the missionaries told. She leans heavily on Fawn Brodie’s biased biography of Joseph Smith but doesn’t cite standard academic histories like Jan Shipps’s Mormonism. The ending—celebrating the “tolerance” and “hope for a community of faith irrespective of creed” that, in Denton’s view, Jean Rio espoused by the end of her life—is anodyne.
Jean Rio’s is an interesting life, but Denton’s fourth outing disappoints.Pub Date: April 28, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4135-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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