A thoroughly impressive, eminently readable work of revisionist history.
In this excellent biography of the famed bandit, journalist/historian Stiles reveals his subject as less a Robin Hood than an Osama bin Laden for his time.
The son of a luckless itinerant preacher who died broke in the gold fields of California, James (1847–82) came of age among hardscrabble Missourians who shared “a willingness to resort to violence . . . to resolve private disputes or keep public order.” When the border war flared up between slaveholders and pro-Union sympathizers along the Missouri River, James became a murderous member of one of the small guerrilla cells “that fought without central direction or official Confederate sanction” and were not shy about killing their supposed secessionist allies when it suited them, to say nothing of dismembering enemy corpses for pleasure. Though liberal in his range of targets, he was not apolitical, and long after war’s end, he took pains to terrorize Unionists and other enemies of the Confederacy; Stiles suggests that he even chose to stage his fateful raid on the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, because the abolitionist hero Adelbert Ames owned a controlling interest in it. James had a powerful ally and publicist in newspaper editor John Newman, an unapologetic champion of the Lost Cause who glamorized him as a friend and protector of the common man in the face of greedy carpetbaggers. On the contrary, Stiles insists, Jesse James was a terrorist. The author matches a real flair for the biographer’s art with an appreciation for the historical complexities of the time, especially for the ironies of the post-Reconstruction era, when much of the nation repudiated the radical goals of abolitionism, “sandpapered away by the economic depression and Democratic intransigence,” and white supremacy was restored, making the world safe for the likes of Jesse James and his carefully constructed myth.
A thoroughly impressive, eminently readable work of revisionist history.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40583-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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