Bogart was only eight when his famous father died; now that he's a grown-up, a published author (Play It Again, 1995), and a TV producer, he is ready to confront the legend. As a young man, Stephen Bogart was troubled by the fame of his father; he felt abandoned after the actor's premature death at 57 and oppressed by his equally famous mother's enshrining of Bogie's memory. When MomLauren Bacall (who will contribute the book's forward)urged him to learn about his father, Stephen resisted mightily, ``fleeing my father's ghost at every turn.'' Now an adult with kids of his own, Stephen is ready to confront his family past, and this biography of Bogieas much about Stephen's growing up as about his father's life and careeris the result. The book opens by paraphrasing the sappy pop song ``Key Largo'': ``When I was a kid I had it all. Just like Bogie and Bacall. In fact, I had them, too.'' It's a bad omen. The author in fact has little to add to the already familiar story of his father's roots in wealth, rebellion against his parents, ups and downs on Broadway, sputtering Hollywood career, and eventual skyrocketing takeoff with High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca. He repeats some familiar anecdotes about his old man's excessive drinking and needling wit, talks to some of his cronies, and offers us the results in artless, flat prose that does nothing to engage the reader. Bogart contributes nothing to our knowledge of his father's films, his politics, his sex life, or his marriage to Bacall. He spends entirely too much time making inappropriate comparisons between his father's habits, beliefs, and conduct and his own. A memoir clearly written to exorcise some personal ghosts. (First printing of 125,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93987-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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