A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind.
A writer's life, solitary and complex, broken apart—not into shards but puzzle pieces.
In Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015), poet and essayist Manguso assessed her life as a writer and mother with the greatest economy of means. In her latest, she goes a step further. "Think of this as a short book,” she advises, rather late in the book, “composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages." At first glance, it seems like a collection of off-kilter “Thoughts for the Day.” There are pithy aphorisms: "Inner beauty can fade, too"; dark, reflective thoughts: “Preferable to accepting one’s insignificance is imagining the others hate you”; purely personal confessions of sexual despair: “There are people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger.” These seemingly random and casual assertions subtly form a kind of loose story, that of a writer, academic, and mother at midlife wondering how the win-loss record might add up—and on which side this particular book might fall. “I’ve written whole books to avoid writing other books,” she confesses at one point, suggesting a failure of ambition. Some pages later she seems to feel at a loss: “I wish someone would tell me what I should be doing instead of this, that he’d be right, and that I’d believe him.” Self-doubt becomes part of a larger, more evocative struggle—to keep going, keep writing, and leave evidence of having lived: “On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here.”
A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-764-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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