Sometimes there are pressing reasons to publish a work posthumously. But sometimes, as with this slim collection of autobiographical fragments and deeply felt pet anecdotes by a talented actress, the reasons for publication are less compelling. Although she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress early in her career (for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), as well as two Tony Awards for her work on stage (including best actress, for her role in A Thousand Clowns), Dennis's true calling was apparently as an animal lover, a role in which she displayed substantial and ceaseless talent. Piecemeal fashion, she recounts here how, over the years, she took in any number of dogs and dozens and dozens of cats, most of them strays and foundlings. Even when she was touring with a production, a few more cats would find their way to her and be added to the mÇnage. Like all true pet lovers, Dennis was endlessly tolerant as furniture, drapes, even telephones suffered the onslaught of so many capering claws. Every meal was a desperate defensive action. Water pistols worked for a time, but eventually a dog ate the pistols and Dennis was forced to give up meat: ``Even then all was not safe, as there seemed to be a growing number of vegetarian and pasta groupies among the carnivores.'' The non-pet portions of this book are almost exclusively childhood memories. Though precise and visceral, they read more like method acting memory exercises than cogent narratives. Much of this book was written while Dennis was dying of cancer, which does give the writing the strong emotional overlay of promise unfulfilled. Despite the editor's best efforts to weld these disparate fragments together, they never really cohere into anything more than a series of precious, pointillist moments. (23 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 27, 1997
ISBN: 1-57601-001-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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