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THE BOHEMIAN LOVE DIARIES

Name: THE BOHEMIAN LOVE DIARIES
Author: Slash Coleman
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8698-5

A MEMOIR

by Slash Coleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2013

An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.

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Professional storyteller and Psychology Today blogger Coleman looks to his past in this eclectic coming-of-age memoir.

Acutely aware of the influences of his drifter sculptor father, “a cross between Ringo Starr and Daniel Boone,” and Holocaust-surviving mother, the author trumpets the bohemian tendencies that inspired his own artistic development. Early on, the author describes his father’s recurrent escape fantasy of road-tripping to Alaska with a clarity that essentially characterizes the thematic structure of the memoir and his life: “saturated with abandon and testosterone and bound with some kind of twisted love plot.” Buffeted on the one hand by his artist father’s rather public paranoia concerning all things adult and, on the other, his mother’s fear of self-revelation, Coleman’s identity formed in the fulcrum of these opposing forces, and he displayed a dramatic penchant for passionate attachments and anti-establishment behavior. As the author matured, he often found himself pining for some unattainable or unsustainable love interest while trying and often failing to measure up to traditional expectations, whether in an MFA writing program or the workplace. One particularly memorable scene occurred in Maine, where Coleman had landed a temporary position as a substitute teacher and had been asked to give a talk on education at a fundraiser for the incumbent governor. His original plan was to “speak for five minutes and then give a short whirling dervish demonstration.” Instead, for some reason unbeknownst even to him, Coleman slowly removed all his clothing, which resulted in the eventual losses of both his job and his love at the time. While the author’s account exhibits flashes of humor and thoughtful introspection—passages analyzing his mother’s reasons for hiding her Jewish identity prove especially moving—the memoir is far too episodic and inconsistent to cohere.

An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.

Pub Date: July 16, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-7627-8698-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Lyons Press

Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)