An unexpectedly moving memoir.
The noted NFL insider recounts how he built a family with a 9/11 widow.
Schefter (editor: The Class of Football: Words of Hard-Earned Wisdom from Legends of the Gridiron, 2009, etc.) met his future wife, Sharri Maio, just as he was starting to heal from a period of illness that had left him questioning his life path. Driven and successful, the once-divorced, 39-year-old author had been desperately seeking—and not finding—“the perfect relationship.” His life changed forever when he decided to take a chance on a 9/11 widow and her young son. Their connection was immediate and profound—and complex. The first and most challenging complication was Sharri’s dead husband, Joe, a man beloved and admired by all who knew him. On their first date, Schefter learned that Joe was still an abiding presence in Sharri’s life and that he and Joe shared the same birthday. The second complication was Sharri’s son: “She needed somebody who had chemistry with her and Devon.” For the first time, Schefter was forced to consider the realities of a relationship and learn to accommodate a partner who “felt permanently tethered to [death].” Tentatively, the author made his way through this “new territory.” On the first 9/11 anniversary they experienced together and for every 9/11 afterward, he sent her flowers. Schefter also became close to Joe’s parents, who were still very much a part of Sharri’s life. Despite a series of personal problems, including a difficult pregnancy, that beset the pair after they married, they grew beyond their differences and bonded through illness and other family tragedies, including the suicide of Joe’s brother. Schefter’s book is affecting not only for the story it tells of how the author learned to honor his wife’s husband as “the fifth member of [his] family,” but also for how it shows a man growing into a mature understanding of the true meaning of love and sacrifice.
An unexpectedly moving memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16189-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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