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THE GROWING SEASONS

Name: THE GROWING SEASONS
Author: Samuel Hynes
ISBN: 0-670-03193-3

AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD BEFORE THE WAR

by Samuel Hynes ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to...

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A recollection of the people, the sights, sounds, smells—the feel—of a boyhood in a harsh and splendid time in America.

Hynes (The Soldiers’ Tale, 1997, etc.), now a near-80 professor emeritus (Literature/Princeton), was motherless at five. He grew up in various places until his father settled in Minneapolis and married again. The Great Depression, seemingly permanent, was at its nadir. It was a time when folks made do or did without. It was a hard time and, in many ways, a happy time, too. Kids might easily get into trouble, but not into danger. Many people never bothered to lock their cars or front doors. Each night, though, Sam’s father ritually latched his door. He was independent, striving, and never quite making it, married to a decent, frugal, hardworking stepmother to his two boys. As his son recalls him, his father was gentle and good. Trust the author’s memory. He remembers the seasons: the halcyon summer on a farm, culminating by a view of a stallion servicing a mare (“something heroic . . . like a parade or a brass band”), and the Minnesota winter, with laundry frozen on the line and snow that made distance evaporate. With him we play cops and robbers again (the little kids are the cops), listen to radio serials, graduate finally to long pants and discover jazz. We edit the high-school newspaper, take Manual Training, and encounter, fumbling, the opposite sex. The tale closes, not ends, as the nearly grown-up boy enters WWII. It is nothing really extraordinary, nothing uncommon; it’s just a story told with uncommon narrative skill. Past tense frequently gives way to present tense, present again in those youthful days now long past. It’s a work evocative for those who remember just which war was The War and instructive to everyone else. The trip to the author’s bountiful root cellar of memory is augmented with snapshots and clippings.

Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to be.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-670-03193-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON WAR AND WRITING
by Samuel Hynes

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR
by Samuel Hynes

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SOLDIERS' TALE
by Samuel Hynes

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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)