QUICKSANDS

Name: QUICKSANDS
Author: Sybille Bedford
ISBN: 1-58243-169-8

by Sybille Bedford ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005

Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing...

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Breathless, halting memoir in fragments by the English stylist, friend and biographer of Aldous Huxley, and late-blooming novelist.

Bedford begins in the middle of her life, in 1953, when she’s in her early 40s, meandering happily in Switzerland and savoring the publication of her first novel. By fits and starts, she then moves back in time, noting that in Italy after WWII, on the island of Ischia, when she was 36, she and her journalist friend Martha Gellhorn (post-Hemingway) ran into an old family acquaintance, the so-called “Kraut Baronessa,” who had married a German diplomat and worked on the “wrong side” of the war (friendly with Franco, among others); seeing her evokes the Italian aristocratic milieu of Bedford’s mother, who left her husband and remarried a handsome Italian, Alessandro, and would summon her daughter, living in the English Midlands, to spend the summers with her. Gradually, the full story emerges: Bedford’s loafing Monte Carlo collector father and wealthy, fickle mother raised her for a spell at a grand country house in the southwest corner of Germany before separating to glamorous far-flung regions; eventually, the nearly illiterate daughter ran away from home to find her married half-sister, Jacko, in Rome. Despite her lack of formal education, young Bedford wanted to be a writer, and composed several unpublished novels before her middle-aged coup, all the while journeying across Europe and Mexico with friends such as her mentor Pierre Mimerel, a social philosopher, and Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, who orchestrated Bedford’s hasty marriage to one of their “bugger friends” in order to secure an English passport. It’s a shifting, erratic journey through the century, most affecting when Bedford halts to describe her mother’s descent into morphine addiction, while the 20 later years, living in sunny climes with American Eda Lord, are dismissed in a paragraph.

Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing her nine other works.)

Pub Date: April 1, 2005

ISBN: 1-58243-169-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
JIGSAW
by Sybille Bedford

- BOOK REVIEW
LEGACY
by Sybille Bedford

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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.

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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

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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...

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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)