Mostly for fans of Nadelson’s fiction.
Nadelson (Aftermath: Stories, 2011, etc.) takes a break from fiction to deliver this bit of personal history.
The author grew up in New Jersey, but the first half of his memoir takes place in Oregon, where he moved after college. There he met his ex-fiancee, the woman who acted as impetus for the book. She left Nadelson a month before their planned wedding, and the breakup and its lonely aftermath form the backbone of his musings. After spending the bulk of the book chronicling those years, Nadelson turns to memories of his high school years and one summer as an adolescent at camp. During these chapters, he occasionally refers back to the dark period he experienced after his breakup, but he doesn’t connect the segments in any major way. The lessons learned from his younger self are, when defined, eloquent and universal. About his uncle’s suicide he writes, “What I glimpsed in Uncle Mitch’s death, I can see now, was the well of potential suffering we all live with but rarely acknowledge.” These moments hint at the wisdom acquired with time and self-examination, but they are unfortunately matched and even overshadowed by the opposite: times when the author sounds like he’s still an angry teenager. Describing parents of his fellow campers, he writes, “These parents were the tacky rich, desperate to prove how high they’d climbed, and their children were spoiled and snobbish, nothing to envy.” Nadelson may be right about this, but coming from the point of view of his older and hopefully wiser self, it just sounds bitter and judgmental. The series of vignettes he sketches are well-illustrated, but they lack focus and direction; many of them have little or nothing to do with the relationship disaster that seems to have sparked the writer’s life analysis.
Mostly for fans of Nadelson’s fiction.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9834775-6-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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