An important cautionary memoir about the dangers of everyday chemicals and environmental toxicity and its lethal...
The story of a Florida attorney who nearly died from a mystery illness borne in a high-rise office building.
Bell, a former organized crime prosecutor, harrowingly details the sinister malady that robbed him of his livelihood and nearly his life. He first began experiencing symptoms in 1988 while working high above Fort Lauderdale in a newly constructed office building. The author’s youthful aspirations included aiming high for the U.S. Senate, but his plans took a detour with family life, child-rearing, and a potentially deadly new health problem. Episodes of shortness of breath, waves of nausea, and vertigo became more prevalent and vexing, and though diagnosed and treated for pneumonia and a fungal throat infection, the inexplicable symptoms continued, morphing into an all-encompassing sickness that perplexed medical specialists. With some diligent research, Bell eventually began correlating his deteriorating health to a human poisoning condition called “sick building syndrome,” which surfaced in the 1970s when buildings were sealed to conserve energy. The author was eventually forced to exist in a sterile bubble as his sensitivity to chemicals and airborne irritants increased and radical detoxification efforts failed. Though his marriage collapsed during his crisis, things did improve once he began treatment for lesions on his brain, doubtlessly exacerbated by exposure to toxins. Though Bell’s life span and vitality have been severely compromised by this ordeal, he educates and forewarns others by citing several intriguing cases of environmental poisoning involving black mold, neighborhood pesticides, and an unregulated toxic waste dump. All of these examples reinforce the new career direction he now takes in advocating for victims of environmental and chemical injury. His frustration with the current lack of governmental awareness and action is clearly evident, though Bell does his part in generously sharing pages of lifestyle modifications geared toward detoxifying the home and one’s lifestyle.
An important cautionary memoir about the dangers of everyday chemicals and environmental toxicity and its lethal consequences.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0264-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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