Not only did the collaboration result in this, the author’s first published book, but the same publisher has agreed to issue...
An aspiring author discovers that writing a novel is hard work, even harder when his taskmaster mentor is his friend John Grisham.
Even with the best-selling Grisham’s encouragement, advice and painstaking edits, Vanderwarker couldn’t sell his novel. A former adman who moved to Virginia around the same time as Grisham and who shared with the novelist environmental activism and a love of sports, Vanderwarker had long wanted to channel his creativity into a book, though a bunch of unpublished manuscripts were the only results. At lunch one day, he received a surprising offer from his friend Grisham: “Look, I’d be willing to help you if you’d like. Kind of mentor you through the novel-writing process. Something I’ve never done before—not that plenty of people haven’t asked.” Grisham would later remark of the manuscript that the “dialogue doesn’t sound real.” Neither does it here, as Vanderwarker purports to remember paragraphs of conversation from a time that he wouldn’t have been taking notes. He ultimately found his mentor criticizing his characters, plotting, organization and pretty much everything else about a novel that is presented here in chunks of various drafts, with Grisham’s notes, and then revisions, with notes. “What happened to the vision of novel writing as a glorious act of creation with rays of light streaming down from on high and a string section playing in accompaniment?” he wonders. “It’s been replaced by the mundane piecework of tedious and time-consuming revision.” If nothing else, the book convinces readers that the prolific Grisham works methodically on his fiction, as the author’s experience confirms that it isn’t as easy to write a best-seller as some might think.
Not only did the collaboration result in this, the author’s first published book, but the same publisher has agreed to issue the novel that had been rejected, for which this how-to guide serves as an extended promotion.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62636-552-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
