by Brooke Ellison & Jean Ellison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2001
A tribute to the remarkable strength of a family in the face of disaster.
A potently straightforward account of how Brooke Ellison managed to attend a mainstream public school and graduate from Harvard after being struck by a car and paralyzed from the neck down at age 11.
Unfolding the story in alternating chapters, Brooke and her mother, Jean, begin their account the day of the accident, Brooke’s first day of junior high school. Brooke was expected to die from her injuries; her spinal cord was severed and she was in a coma for days. When she regained consciousness, she had lost all control of her body from the neck down, but her parents were determined to give their child as normal a life as possible. That meant finding a way for Brooke to attend the local public school. In what would come to be standard practice in the Ellison household, Jean accompanied her daughter to school when adequate nursing wasn’t available. Mother saw daughter through junior high and high school, and when Brooke was accepted to Harvard, the two moved to Cambridge together. Employing a matter-of-fact tone, mother and daughter run through the challenges faced over the years: grappling with a school board unwilling to provide aides, finding ways to study when Brooke could not write, or turn the pages of a book, dealing with the awkwardness of Brooke’s longing for a romantic connection while she was imprisoned in a body that would not respond and had to be monitored at all times by her mother. The story’s power does not come from its style or elegance or the philosophizing of the Ellison women—although they surely were strengthened by their faith—but from the revelation of just how compromised a quadriplegic body is and how much dedication and strength of mind are necessary to get that body through a normal day.
A tribute to the remarkable strength of a family in the face of disaster.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6770-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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