bookshelf

THE ANATOMY OF SURVIVAL

Name: THE ANATOMY OF SURVIVAL
Author: Stephen M. Nadukkudiyil
ISBN: 978-1461119203

AN ODYSSEY OF GLOBAL ADVENTURES

by Stephen M. Nadukkudiyil ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2011

A straightforward, good-humored narration of a genuinely fascinating life, but with too many pages devoted to its mundane...

bookshelf

In this debut memoir, a globetrotting teacher from small-town India recounts 80 years at home and throughout Africa, against backdrops of occasional political turmoil.

Nadukkudiyil was born in what is now the southern Indian state of Kerala, in 1931, a time when his older relatives could still remember people being bought and much of the country was under British rule. During the next 20 years, Nadukkudiyil lived out a happy, colorful childhood; India struggled for independence; our narrator graduated high school and miserably attempted to work the family farm before being granted a reprieve in the form of college; colonialism ended to great jubilation but also great turbulence; and Nadukkudiyil ran away from home to make his way in the big bad city of Madras, where he was robbed, experienced life at the bottom rung of society and returned home the sheepish prodigal son. Upon graduating college, he set out to teach in first the port city of Aden (now part of Yemen), then rural Ethiopia, less-rural Ethiopia, Eritrea, and finally Nigeria, where he stayed for 25 years through a bloody coup and the Nigerian civil war. Along the way, he married and had kids. The narrator’s good cheer and upbeat outlook on life make for absorbing reading, and wonderfully vivid images appear throughout, such as a childhood memory of clearing the front yard of frogs during a monsoon or milk bottles corked with rolled-up leaves. However, the story is flattened by a lack of shaping or pacing. Too much weight is given to mundane details like the layout of a school or the bureaucratic process of applying for a job transfer, while events that should stand out in sharper relief, like the sight of an anti-Jewish massacre in Aden, are lost in the deluge of information. Numerous unfamiliar terms are used without explanation, and major events like the births of the author’s children do not receive much attention.

A straightforward, good-humored narration of a genuinely fascinating life, but with too many pages devoted to its mundane aspects.

Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2011

ISBN: 978-1461119203

Page Count: 563

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

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.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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)