A warm evocation of a quirky life and exuberant times.
Candid recollections of growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1980s.
Graphic designer, illustrator, and memoirist Shopsin (Mumbai New York Scranton, 2013, etc.) continues her life story in a chronicle constructed of terse paragraphs, whimsical graphics, and family photographs. The author, her twin sister, and three brothers ranged freely in the neighborhood around Morton Street, where her parents—her irascible father, Kenny, a cook, and gentle mother, Eve—owned The Store, a grocery, later turned into a restaurant that attracted celebrities such as John Belushi, Calvin Trillin (he paid in cookbooks), poet Joseph Brodsky, John F. Kennedy Jr., handsome in Lycra bike shorts, and a host of models, rock stars, and athletes. Good customers got a set of keys so they could go to the store any time it was closed, write down what they took, and pay later. Born in 1979, the year the schoolboy Etan Patz disappeared, Shopsin was hardly overprotected. “The city may have been more dangerous,” she writes, “but it was a less hostile place. Everyone knew each other.” Still, she witnessed blacks beaten up by a gang of boys, drug addicts sleeping in doorways, and homeless people living in playgrounds. “It is easy to cite the bad in the filthy chaos of New York before luxury condos,” she writes. “It is harder to express the spirit, life, and community that the chaos and inefficiency bred.” The author succeeds admirably in expressing that spirit, largely through sharp, loving portraits of two brash, irreverent, opinionated men: her father, who summarily banned certain customers from his restaurant, and his best friend Willy, superintendent of an apartment building, occasional nightclub singer, flagrant womanizer, and scam artist. Shopsin adored them both. It was her father who came up with the phrase “Arbitrary Stupid Goal” to describe his “guiding belief”: “A goal that isn’t too important makes you live in the moment, and still gives you a driving force” that allows you “to find ecstasy in the small things, the unexpected, and the everyday.”
A warm evocation of a quirky life and exuberant times.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10586-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
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