A former prostitute’s inspiring transformation, ably told.
A woman describes how she was drawn into exploitative sex work as a young teenager and her difficult transition back to a normal life in this memoir.
“Kick me hard with those sexy boots,” pleaded the man who was 13-year-old Amaya’s introduction to prostitution. Amaya (The Destiny of Zoe Carpenter, 2013) grew up in the 1960s in suburban Fairfax, Virginia, leading a fairly ordinary life until she was 10, when, she recounts, her father and then brother began molesting her. On her 12th birthday, she ran away for the first of many times, then began taking drugs: “they made my bad memories and feelings disappear.” She wound up in New York City with a pimp named Moses. Lonely, young, and needy, Amaya had no resistance to Moses’ combination of praise, protection, and warmth mixed with brutal beatings to keep her in line. After some years of prostitution, addiction to heroin, jail terms, and beatings, she left Moses, reconnected somewhat with her family, and detoxed through a methadone clinic. Gaining confidence in small steps, Amaya re-entered the straight world. She married and had a daughter (later leaving her husband, she recalls, because of his violence and drinking), opened a day care center, and survived a cancer bout. Her daughter’s teenage years, and increasing media attention to sex trafficking spurred Amaya to tell her whole story, help young girls like herself, and clear her criminal record of juvenile charges. In this honest, thoughtful, and powerful memoir, Amaya describes (with often heartbreaking clarity) how easy it is for a confused, hurting girl to get caught up in a pimp’s false offers of love and caretaking. Stories of this type tend to end when someone is released from trafficking, but Amaya puts a useful spotlight on the difficulties of going straight: “Growing up on the streets of New York had turned me into an adult even while part of me remained a child, frozen in time.” Her courage in facing adult life with only a sixth-grade education is commendable, and while her account is sometimes harrowing, Amaya never tugs heartstrings unnecessarily or exhibits self-pity.
A former prostitute’s inspiring transformation, ably told.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9912550-2-3
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Animal Media Group
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
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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