Contrary to its expectation-raising subtitle, a sad story of no compelling current import. For more historical context, see...
Workmanlike biography of the first woman to swim the English Channel demonstrates that fame is fleeting and a moment of youthful glory is no guarantee of a glamorous life.
Associated Press sports columnist Dahlberg (Fight Town: Las Vegas—The Boxing Capital of the World, 2004), aided here by his subject’s niece and by business writer Greene, bases much of his account on newspaper clippings in the personal archives of Gertrude Ederle (1905–2003), supplemented by her unfinished, unpublished memoirs. The authors begin with Ederle’s failed Channel crossing in 1925 and her disappointing performance at the 1924 Olympics (only one gold medal and two bronze). The details of her preparations for the cross-Channel swim in the summer of 1926 and the challenges of the feat are entertainingly recounted, but the narrative begins to falter after that. Dahlberg presents Ederle as an agent of change, citing her design of a body-hugging two-piece silk bathing suit in an era when women wore heavy wool “swimming costumes” that concealed their bodies, and noting the enthusiasm with which feminists greeted her achievement in breaking the men’s speed record for a cross-Channel swim. She was given a ticker-tape parade in New York City and had a brief career in vaudeville before the public lost interest in the shy, stocky, hearing-impaired young woman whose genuine talent for swimming was difficult to capitalize on. Not only was Ederle’s manager a poor businessman, but there was little interest in swimmers for stage or screen. Adding to her difficulties, she broke her pelvis in a fall in 1933. Ederle’s decline into obscurity was halted briefly when Billy Rose hired her for his Aquacade at the 1939 World’s Fair, but the woman who had been named top athlete of the year in 1926 was not even on the ballots in 1944.
Contrary to its expectation-raising subtitle, a sad story of no compelling current import. For more historical context, see Gavin Mortimer’s The Great Swim (2008).Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38265-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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