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FURTHERING MY EDUCATION

Name: FURTHERING MY EDUCATION
Author: William A. Corbett
ISBN: 0-944072-74-7

A MEMOIR

by William A. Corbett ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1997

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A focused, intelligent exploration of a parent's betrayal, leading to the hard-won discoveries that constitute the author's own ongoing education of the heart. When Corbett's physician-father abandoned his wife, his medical practice, his dog, and his Connecticut home in 1965, he also left behind two grown sons. The note Corbett Sr. left tacked to the door said, ``I have gone to further my education.'' This cold fact opens the book and permeates every page. As he fled the country, the good doctor left a further cryptic message with the author's wife, Beverly, saying that ``things aren't what they seem.'' Poet and essayist Corbett (Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir, not reviewed), a lecturer in writing at MIT and poetry editor of Grand Street, here employs an appealingly plain style to describe his efforts to delve into the mystery of his father's life and relations. He realizes that his father was for some reason unable ultimately to love. ``That adhesion that bonds parent to child, that inexplicable surge of love for your own flesh and blood . . . must not have taken between my father and me. Or this bond weakened during his years at war,'' writes Corbett, who in reconstructing his father's story also traces his own emotional and literary development, including his admittedly formless and overwritten early attempts to narrate this difficult material. Corbett patiently and lucidly dissects the triangle of affections and hesitancies he formed with his parents, now both deceased. He effectively captures the mood of tragicomedy surrounding family members in the days immediately following his father's leaving, and artfully details the ensuing strains of his relationship with his mother. The son's insights seem to issue, finally, as much from revealed history as from his own gift for thoughtful self- examination undertaken over the years. These insights are expressed in an understated narrative exhibiting great clarity, perspective, and order.

Pub Date: April 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-944072-74-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DRUMS OF WAR
edited by William A. Corbett ; by T.C. Corbett

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)