by Wendell Pierce ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2015
An affecting account of a driven man, a sturdy family, and a resilient community.
A star of The Wire and Treme debuts with the twin stories of his rising career and the slow return of his native New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Pierce begins with a 2007 New Orleans street production of Waiting for Godot (he played Vladimir), a play, he argues, with profound relevance for the struggling city. From this play—more than 300 pages later he tells us more—the author returns to his slave ancestors and gradually brings us the stories of his father and mother, who are the real heroes here. His father worked two jobs to keep them in their neighborhood of Pontchartrain Park (later destroyed by the hurricane), and his mother, Tee, emerges as a towering character. The author comments continually about the importance of family, community support, and high expectations; he believes these were the principal factors in his early life, factors that helped him win a slot at Juilliard and a successful acting career. But we also see Pierce animated by Katrina’s devastations. He has become deeply involved in community restoration—he was able to get his parents back in their storm-ravaged home—and has some sharp words for the politicians and their cronies, many of whom complicate things. It’s appropriate that Pierce’s work is something of a gumbo—a mix of memoir, social psychology, literary analysis, and political and religious philosophy. Oddly missing is even the faintest whiff of anything about his personal life. Yes, we know about his roles, his intellectual and literary passions (the works of August Wilson among them), his friendships (Wynton Marsalis’ tribute to Pierce’s mother is an extraordinarily moving segment of the text), and his family history, but we learn nothing about any of his relationships—lovers? spouse? children?
An affecting account of a driven man, a sturdy family, and a resilient community.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-323-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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