Especially valuable for the early chapters on the youthful, pre-fame Williams, but in its entirety a tender portrait that...
Fragmentary but affecting memories of the playwright by former Library of Congress poetry consultant Smith (Up the Hill and Down, 2003, etc.).
They met in 1935 at Washington University in St. Louis, where Williams, Smith and Clark Mills were the only male students in the Poetry Club. Williams thought of himself primarily as a poet in those days, although he had already written some one-act dramas. His first full-length plays were presented in 1937 by an amateur theatrical group, the Mummers. Smith, who attended both, provides appreciative descriptions of Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind, which demonstrated that Williams’ poetic gifts were best served in the theater. The adequate but unexciting verses Smith quotes illustrate the same point, but Williams continued to write poetry throughout his life. The author movingly captures the importance of poetry to Williams in his account of the disastrous 1940 Boston premiere of Battle of Angels, after which the distraught playwright asked his friend to read John Donne aloud to ease his despair. Smith’s recollections of seeing The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire are less interesting, mostly because the plays have been written about so much, but the author’s affection for his troubled friend is evident even in later chapters that show Williams making public appearances visibly under the influence of drink and drugs. Smith suggests that Williams never really got over the death of his companion Frank Merlo. The author has a knack for selecting astute, little-known critical evaluations of Williams from such unlikely sources as Kenneth Tynan and John Simon (both uncharacteristically appreciative); he also uncovers an intriguing exchange between Williams and Yukio Mishima, who agreed that Southern and Japanese literature had strong affinities. There’s nothing revelatory in these slightly scattered reminiscences, but they flesh out our knowledge of Williams with a warmly personal touch.
Especially valuable for the early chapters on the youthful, pre-fame Williams, but in its entirety a tender portrait that will appeal to scholars and fans alike.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61703-175-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
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