Refreshingly original reading.
An acquisitions editor and freelance writer tells the story of how she became the owner and landlady of a century-old New England tenement home.
In 2004, Warner bought a three-story house she called PennHenge in the gritty Federal Hill area of Providence, Rhode Island. She was in her mid-20s and feeling the “twinge of wanting in” to a real estate market she feared would one day be closed to her. Big, awkward, and decaying, from the street PennHenge looked like “a freakishly large tooth in a grinning mouth.” Yet Warner made the commitment to buy it anyway, convinced that she would be embarking on a “practical endeavor” that would double as her version “of a badass path less traveled.” Soon after moving in, she became painfully aware that PennHenge would need many repairs and upgrades that she could not afford. Determined to make her new living arrangement work, Warner rented out two of the three floors to a rotating cast of lively oddball characters who, like the author herself, were young and “straining to leave adolescence.” Her independence and feminist impulses pushed her to take responsibility for the house and tenant “messes large and small.” But after years of feeling overwhelmed, she learned to “cede control in order to preserve my mental state.” As Warner accepted her limitations and the cheerful chaos that defined her reality, she also realized that no matter how imperfect her home, she genuinely loved it as it was. Things in PennHenge may have been dirty, broken, or misaligned, but the author was still happy for what she had created in a world obsessed by illusions of perfect—and ultimately unsustainable—lifestyles. The book is not only a story of a young woman’s often hilarious (mis)adventures in homeownership; it is also a thoughtful meditation on how living spaces both reflect and shape the individuals who inhabit them.
Refreshingly original reading.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936932-21-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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