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LIFESAVING FOR BEGINNERS

Name: LIFESAVING FOR BEGINNERS
Author: Anne Edelstein
ISBN: 978-1-59709-605-8

by Anne Edelstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017

A poignantly candid memoir about navigating the often rocky shores of family.

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A former editor and literary agent tells the story of how her mother’s unexpected death forced her to come to terms with a tragic family past.

When Edelstein’s healthy 68-year-old mother suddenly drowned while snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, her world upended. Not only did she have to confront the conflicting feelings she had long harbored toward her emotionally distant parent; she also had to process unresolved grief for a brother, Danny, who had committed an especially violent act of suicide 15 years earlier. The author’s mother had been a woman for whom order meant everything and whose love came with a “debilitating web of anxiety” that entangled those who were close to her. No one could speak the truth of what they were feeling; “everyone had to act like our world was perfectly okay.” It was her sweet, funny brother who helped Edelstein navigate the treacherous field around her mother. But as he grew older, his gentle manner gave way to meanness and irresponsibility, which she later recognized as symptoms of the illness that caused Danny to kill himself at age 22. Over time, the author learned that both her mother’s and brother’s behaviors came from an inherited tendency toward depression and bipolar disorder that had affected her mother’s father, who committed suicide at age 50 after multiple failed attempts; and her mother’s brother, who also committed midlife suicide. By revisiting her family’s past, Edelstein gradually began to understand that her mother’s maddening rigidity came from being “surrounded by suicide on all sides.” Determined not to let her emotional burdens drown her or destroy her marriage and family, she began the courageous task of breaking the silence around her family’s past to her own children. Touching and honest, Edelstein’s book offers keen analysis of the mother-daughter relationship while probing the perennial question of what makes humans choose life or death.

A poignantly candid memoir about navigating the often rocky shores of family.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-59709-605-8

Page Count: 232

Publisher: Red Hen Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)