Dutifully constructed and sometimes surprising, but only occasionally insightful.
Pro skateboarder loses everything to drugs, sees little light at the end of the tunnel afterward.
Readers will learn more about Novak’s impressive skateboarding career in the ’90s by reading Tony Hawk’s foreword than by reading the book itself. This is an addiction memoir, and the genre’s format is by now practically set in stone: modern-day opener into which rude reality intrudes, then flashback to start of life of addiction, leading up to getting clean and ultimately vindication. While Novak and co-author Frantz don’t stint on the stock scenarios, they break the mold by not pretending that a junkie’s chaotic life can or should be represented in such a cut-and-dried fashion. Novak begins on August 11, 2003: “I am a twenty-five-year-old junkie, sleeping in an abandoned garage in one of the worst parts of Baltimore City.” By the end of that day, he has hustled money from his mother, stolen furniture and turned a trick with a man twice his age to get his fix. The narrative settles into a rhythm after the recidivist Novak is checked into detox by a sponsor of nearly limitless patience. Following that, his account only occasionally darts backward into a happier youth, when he was touring the world as part of the famous Powell Peralta team, skating with the likes of Hawk, Buck Lasek and Steve Caballero. He served as a courier for a dealer while still on the team and crawled into the depths from there. The story of his inveterate addiction is only competently delivered, with Novak and Frantz providing reams of unnatural-sounding dialogue for the totemic figures—understanding counselor, abused mother, tough guardian-angel fellow junkie—who try to halt his slide into self-destruction. The book’s saving grace is the conclusion, which rejects the easy self-congratulation of too many addiction memoirs in favor of a closing memento mori.
Dutifully constructed and sometimes surprising, but only occasionally insightful.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3003-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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