by Sarah Messer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2004
Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.
Poet Messer spins the life story of her childhood home in a handsome voice often eerily lost in reflection.
Nonetheless, this is a document of history, and this is a house with a long one, starting in 1647 when Walter Hatch made a small purchase of land in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and built a structure with wattle-and-daub chimney, thatched roof, and oiled-paper windows. Members of the Hatch family lived there for nearly 300 years, enduring many winters during which they “stood scorched-faced before the fire, while the rest of the room to their backs filled with frost.” In 1965, the author’s father bought the Red House, and she grew up there. Messer (Poetry and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington) elaborates the calendar of her days in and with the house, layered like a parfait between chronicles of the earlier inhabitants, who had left a rich paper legacy. Messer’s recollections sometimes feel as hoary as those of the Hatches: she speaks of her father tying tinfoil bows on the fruit trees to scare away hungry birds, so that “the whole yard shook with the soft tinkling of the bows and spots of light”; and when she spied on her sister playing the piano, “I would lie down and peer through the cracks in the floorboards where I could see her hands moving over the keys, feeling only the thin space, the board, between me and the room below.” Even the aftermath of a terrifying fire that decimated the building in 1971 is described with a poet’s lyricism: “Entering a burned house was like entering a dream mind—some elements were missing entirely or moved to other locations, the rooms the same but clouded, slightly off.” In a good way, much like Messer’s prose.
Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.Pub Date: June 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03315-4
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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
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