A firsthand account of losing a soul mate that will appeal most to readers dealing with loss or looking for sometimes-tragic...
Bittersweet reflections on romance and its tragic end.
Jordan’s work is less a memoir than a tribute to her late husband, Marvin. “I realized,” she writes, “I was the ‘witness’ for these forty years of his life and all that he did for so many others.” The author’s own background and her move to LA are brief details compared to the time and care she takes to describe meeting her dream man. It was love at first sight when they found each other at a party and then, on their first date, went “fishing” in the oversized aquarium in his living room. Despite her caution around his bold proclamations of intending to marry her, they married nine months later. As she moves back and forth in time among the major events of their relationship—their first date, the first time she met his mother, their last Passover together as an extended family, the ominous news from doctors—she fills them in with reminiscences of tender moments idolizing Marvin, her “creative, amalgamated conundrum.” Eventually, prostate cancer and his heart condition weakened him to such a state that the sweet, playful moments were replaced by visits from hospice nurses and children come home for a final visit. After Marvin’s death, Jordan’s subsequent grief mounted in intensity as her relationships with him and even God were called into question. Particularly powerful is the revelation of one of Marvin’s oldest secrets and Jordan’s subsequent confrontation with his ashes—a moment that might be too melodramatic for a fictional story. But Jordan is a clear, smart writer only relating her emotions as they really happened. She’s too focused on romance and sentimentality to make a profound investigation of grief à la Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), but even when her prose so swoons for Marvin, her conviction in catharsis keeps the book from turning maudlin.
A firsthand account of losing a soul mate that will appeal most to readers dealing with loss or looking for sometimes-tragic realism in a romance.Pub Date: April 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495203800
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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