Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.
The restless Gregorian—presidencies at the New York Public Library, Brown University, the Carnegie Corporation—offers a memoir that expertly blends poetry, pedantry, progressivism, and unruly university politics.
By his fourth sentence, Gregorian is already engaged in a scholarly discourse on the identity of biblical rivers—and so the book continues, with Gregorian always happy to drop in a few lines of Robert Frost, say, or to explain how The Sorrows of Young Werther captures his feelings after a love affair falls apart. For Gregorian is all about brains—big brains, using them nimbly, honestly, compassionately—starting with his grandmother’s teachings when he was a poor youth in Tabriz, Iran, right through to his present post at the Carnegie Corporation. Getting there wasn’t easy, and what a story it makes: leaving Iran, alone and destitute, to study in Beirut; gaining entrance to Stanford; and teaching at San Francisco State in the mid- to late-1960s (where he was faculty advisor to the Progressive Labor Party: Gregorian is equally at ease talking about the vagaries of the history of the Caucasus or about the split in SDS). The author bounces from the University of Texas to Penn, keeping one hand busy with his teaching while dipping the other into the mire of university politics. He is brilliant in delineating the backstabbing, pettiness, and obfuscations he contended with in order to raise the level of educational quality when he was dean at various schools. He has a light touch, knowing when to coax the reader gently through an intricate piece of philanthropic politics, and when to let rip: “I was not a Mr. Magoo. If somebody spits at me, I cannot pretend it is a raindrop.” His stint at the NYPL and now at Carnegie allows him to fuse learning with philanthropy—but his loss from academia is a great one.
Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-80834-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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