A pleasantly thought-provoking memoir.
After the birth of her first child, a lawyer goes on a spiritual quest to “believe in something bigger than myself.”
Until she had her daughter, Kumar, a former legal executive for Google and Warby Parker, was skeptical about religion. She had been raised by practicing Jainists and had attended Catholic school as a young girl. But motherhood changed her. As a parent, she wanted a “spiritual home” where she and her daughter could comfortably live. So Kumar dedicated one year—and after that, an indefinite period of time—to exploring spiritual practices around the world. Her quest took her to Brazil, where she met with John of God, a man who claimed an ability to channel saints, doctors, and scientists and who had earned Oprah Winfrey’s admiration. Later, she traveled to Peru to find a shaman who could offer her a “direct route to God” through ayahuasca. Other trips took her to India, Mexico, and Japan, where she sought out healers, spiritualists, and psychics. Closer to home, she visited SoulCycle, a gym that offered spin classes infused with “a heavy dose of positive thinking set to very loud dance music”; a tequila-drinking “dirty” medium who gave her messages from dead relatives; and the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Kumar also explored the Wiccan religion and befriended several practicing witches. While its respect for women and nature resonated deeply with her, she soon saw that Wicca lacked the omnipotent dread-banishing deity that she also desired. The revelations Kumar experienced ultimately did not change her life, yet each experience helped her understand that the secret to any form of spirituality lay in the “magic” of ritual, belief, and hope it offered people. Candid and entertaining, the book suggests that finding insight into bigger questions about the meaning of life is far less important than knowing all people are united in their desires for health, happiness, and love.
A pleasantly thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58005-661-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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