Lively and astute.
Contextual study of Louisa May Alcott's life (1832–1888) and work, from her childhood among such writers as Emerson, Fuller and Hawthorne, to the astounding literary career that afforded her a feminist independence of spirit even as she remained a caregiver to her family.
In this new biography, Cheever (MFA Program/Bennington Coll; Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, 2008, etc.) presents an insightful narrative of Alcott's life and how her experiences informed, but didn't dictate, her fiction. Raised in the culturally rich and progressive community of Concord, Mass., Alcott was an inquisitive and rebellious child who adored her three sisters and idolized her famous literary neighbors, particularly Emerson, who frequently played the role of benefactor to the often destitute family. Alcott’s father was a hopelessly impractical academic and a domineering patriarch; she had a contentious relationship with him for most of her life and famously wrote him out of her classic, Little Women (1868). Despite these hardships, Alcott dreamed of becoming a writer. Amid the outbreak of the Civil War and her youngest sister's tragic death, Alcott wrote copious journal entries, poems and stories; at age 19 she published her first poem. Twelve years later, she joined the Union Army as a nurse in Washington, and the grisly, poignant experience catapulted her into adulthood and was integral to the development of her mature prose. She published a collection of letters she wrote while on duty to great acclaim and returned to Concord a rising literary star. Within five years she would write Little Women and become one of the most celebrated authors of her time, providing young girls with a novel distinguished by relatable story lines and characters, one that armed generations of readers with a sense of what is possible for women. Alcott was able to exemplify her belief that an unmarried woman could be intelligent, successful and, perhaps more importantly, happy. Throughout the narrative, Cheever allows Alcott's complex humanity to reveal itself slowly, drawing the reader into her iconic life.
Lively and astute.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6991-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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