A hopeful memoir that offers timely insights into why people choose to leave their native lands for new lives in America.
In Anderson’s debut memoir, two Argentinian sisters embark on an overland journey to the United States that will change both their lives.
The author and her sister, Marta, were the daughters of a Peronista who found it impossible to work and adequately support his family after Juan Peron’s fall from power. In the summer of 1968, the 20-something sisters decided to leave their dysfunctional family behind under the guise of a trip north, from which they didn’t intend to return. With $250 in traveler’s checks, train tickets to the Argentine city of Salta and a list of potential contacts throughout South America, the girls luckily found hosts and helpers to facilitate their journey northward, and avoided political disturbances that could have stopped them in their tracks. To the author, whose life had been marked by deep distrust, the kindness of strangers was more of an eye-opener than the journey itself. After the two women wound up in Denver, they began their American lives as nannies—the traditional lot of so many Latina immigrants. Later, the author, despite being a high school dropout, found work in the nascent computer industry and ultimately graduated from the University of Colorado. Their parents eventually followed them, and typically, their father shipped them the family dog, unannounced, as the only warning that they were on their way. Their parents both found work that helped them emerge from the frustration and depression that made their lives in Buenos Aires so unpleasant. The memoir skillfully and organically provides flashbacks of the sisters’ lives in Argentina that illuminate their family relationships and put their experiences in the broader context of Latin American politics and history, contrasting them with those of other hopeful emigres they meet. In an era dominated by anti-immigration rhetoric, this memoir serves as a salutary reminder of the reasons that people take the drastic step of immigration, and the innate goodness of those who help them along the way.
A hopeful memoir that offers timely insights into why people choose to leave their native lands for new lives in America.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493725946
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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