An all-inclusive and honest account of how one woman used a motorcycle journey to come to grips with painful events in her...
How a cross-country motorcycle ride helped the author combat severe depression.
“We’ve all had them—those unbelievably bad years in which one thing after another happens, and we begin to think that something greater than ourselves is trying to tell us something,” writes Schoichet. “In my case, it seemed like I was taunting disaster, because before my life went to hell, I was completely unaware I was heading for a storm.” In less than a year, she lost her job as a publicity writer at a major studio, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother. Devastated by these events, the author knew she had to do something daring in order to get on with her life. So she bought a Harley-Davidson online and decided to ride it from Buffalo to Los Angeles. She figured she’d either die on the highway or learn how to live again. Schoichet fills her memoir of her three-week adventure with sketches of the helpful, crazy, and sometimes-creepy characters she met on her journey—e.g., the group of Harley riders who surrounded her when she stopped to stretch her legs on the side of the road and the woman who took care of her after arriving at a motel in a terrible rainstorm, among many others. The author interweaves stories of her mother and her sisters into the details of her life on the road as she tries to gain perspective on everything that happened in the past, and although she didn’t necessarily find a state of Zen, the ride was definitely therapeutic. Schoichet’s account will resonate with bikers and with those who have always wondered what it feels like to go 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle, but others may find the narrative overly self-indulgent and long.
An all-inclusive and honest account of how one woman used a motorcycle journey to come to grips with painful events in her life.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98180-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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