Insightful and convivial account of a bright, bountiful life dedicated to words, information and wonder.
The digital media revolution powers a lifelong journalist’s sharp, business-minded autobiography.
Former Newsweek senior editor and BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Shepard, now in his 70s, acknowledges the inevitable replacement of traditional media with digital, portable formats. He writes that he foresaw the progression but never imagined its enormity. These musings fittingly accentuate his memoir, a chronicle that recalls a 50-year history as a distinguished journalist, beginning in the Bronx as a Jewish child born to a depressive mother and a hardworking father. A pretty grade school penmanship teacher helped foster an early love of writing, though Shepard misguidedly majored in engineering in college. In 1966, he became a 26-year-old rookie at BusinessWeek, married the first in a line of fellow journalists and penned stories as a foreign economic correspondent. Throughout a breezy wealth of anecdotes, truisms and historical asides, Shepard writes of spending a defining five years at Newsweek, a stint at the doomed Saturday Review, overseeing seminal investigative pieces and advocating an online version at BusinessWeek. While he firmly considers the Internet a destructive “Category Five storm for journalism,” Shepard concedes he’s come full circle in the understanding and even the advocacy of the great migration to digital formats. The author reports rather than complains or bemoans this media acculturation and feels the industry would be best suited by “a convergence of traditional and revolutionary.” Celebrating a two-decade tenure at BusinessWeek and a founding deanship at CUNY’s top-tier graduate journalism program, Shepard’s authoritative and cautionary blessing on the journalism world is both fitting and resolute.
Insightful and convivial account of a bright, bountiful life dedicated to words, information and wonder.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-07-180264-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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
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