Less interior reflection than an uneven but intermittently potent stumble toward a path into an uncertain future.
An essayist challenges expectations of “truth” and “clarity” as he frequently finds himself in a state of flux.
At the beginning of his latest, Church (One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals, 2016, etc.) provides the key to how his work differs from essayistic convention, how “clarity…seems not only highly overrated as a state of mind, but also anathema to the origins of the essay, which saw the form as an exercise in self-doubt and noble confusion.” Noble or not, confusion runs rampant through the early essays, in which reflection rarely proceeds to clarity; often, the author doesn’t seem to know what he thinks about what has happened until well after the fact. Though he describes these essays as outliers that didn’t fit thematically into earlier collections, they hold together fairly well, reading as much like a memoir as an essay collection. Most are set in Colorado and farther West, as Church chronicles the various jobs he worked while finishing his graduate education. He proceeds from the ambivalences of courtship through marriage, fatherhood, and divorce, until the concluding, almost stream-of-consciousness “Overpass Into Fog”: “suspended between past and future, I disappeared into language and place, weather and love, and I wondered how close I’d come to flying totally untethered, released from the bonds of concrete reality.” In many of the essays, Church is bridging, or straddling, or in between something and something else. “We’re all sort of in-between things or just starting something new, definitely in a period of proverbial flux; and we’re still getting used to the changes,” he writes in setting the scene in the powerful title essay, which follows the author’s witnessing a boy’s drowning. He was unable to help, and the experience returns the death of Church’s brother painfully to his consciousness. Fatherhood fills him with fear, much of which he shares in these pages.
Less interior reflection than an uneven but intermittently potent stumble toward a path into an uncertain future.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944853-45-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Outpost19
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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