An earnest, inspiring memoir for Christian readers and fans of Growing Pains.
Phillips’ debut memoir tells the story of how a wish when he was an ill child led to his career as a successful doctor.
As a boy growing up in Jena, Louisiana, the author suffered from a serious heart condition called tetralogy of Fallot. It was so serious that when he was 11 years old, the Starlight Children’s Foundation flew him and his mother to the set of his most beloved television show, ABC’s Growing Pains. Phillips’ favorite character was Ben Seaver, played by child actor Jeremy Miller, mostly because the troubled Phillips was so enamored with Ben’s seemingly perfect life. The trip was a huge inspiration to the author. “The Starlight wish,” he remembers, “set into motion the idea that if I could go from Jena to Hollywood, I could go from despair to hope, from an adolescent death sentence to the fulfilling life I have today as a pediatric cardiologist.” In the memoir, the author recounts that journey, from the effects of his illness on his already troubled family life to his trip to the Growing Pains set to his fears of not being able to attend college to an unexpected second open heart surgery when he was attending medical school in New Orleans. Just as he was graduating, fate happened to bring the reunited Growing Pains cast to Louisiana, giving Phillips the opportunity to thank the actor who’d inspired him years before. Phillips writes in a clean, conversational prose style: “I knew just enough from my anatomy class to worry about the possible risks of the surgery, and I could not stop going over all the things that could go wrong.” In addition to his own story, he writes quite a bit about the life and struggles of Miller, who’s listed as a co-author here; these include dysfunctional family issues, struggles with anxiety, and financial troubles. The connection between Phillips and the sitcom star is legitimately intriguing, and readers who are religiously inclined (like Phillips and Growing Pains co-star Kirk Cameron, who provides the book's introduction) might see the hand of God at work in this story.
An earnest, inspiring memoir for Christian readers and fans of Growing Pains.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-59555-856-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2018
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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