It’s a backstage tour of the fair, but enter for the academic air. If it’s simple carny fun you seek, look for the egress.
After Barnum and before Spielberg, there was Fred Thompson, the perfect prototype of a 20th-century showman.
Now largely forgotten, Thompson (1873–1919) was not just an inventive entrepreneur of carefree amusement but no less than one of the makers of modern society, according to cultural historian Register (American Studies/Sewanee). The professor extracts much significance from the brief career of the promoter who devised extravagant Midway entertainments for expositions at the turn of the 20th century and developed the amusement park as we know it today. Thompson altered Coney Island much the way Disney changed 42nd Street when he built the fabled Luna Park in 1903, creating family entertainment where tawdry pleasures had ruled. He erected the gigantic Hippodrome in midtown Manhattan and filled it for a single giddy year (1905–06) with spectacle upon spectacle. A dedicated shop, the Industrial Light and Magic of its day, produced the Hippodrome’s lavish effects. When it became necessary to recruit backers, Thompson called on money men like the celebrated “Bet-a-Million” Gates. But all the kitsch, bunkum, and ballyhoo couldn’t support the constant need for cash, and eventually the music stopped. The Hippodrome, always losing money, finally succumbed under other management. Others took over Luna Park as well, though it survived in altered form until three fires killed it in the 1940s. But hardly more than a decade after Luna Park closed, Disneyland opened. Register spills much ink on sonorous pronouncements about the meaning of it all, citing, in particular, the impact of androgynous Peter Pan. There are many overdrawn digressions regarding architecture, toys, retailing, movies, space travel, sex, gender studies, and the zeitgeist in general. It’s an aggressively educational text, loading large social implications about the evolution of the amusement industry onto the sketchy story of one its important practitioners.
It’s a backstage tour of the fair, but enter for the academic air. If it’s simple carny fun you seek, look for the egress.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514493-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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