Following her loving husband’s unexpected death, TV producer Joynt came face-to-face with her mate’s secret life. The fallout decimated her once comfortable life, flinging her into a decade of financial and emotional misery.
The author fell deeply in love with Howard Joynt in 1977. As the night assignment editor for the NBC News Washington, D.C., Bureau, she had a successful career, and Howard was a rich, charming, sophisticated restaurateur. They soon married, Joynt abandoned her career and the couple retreated to a large estate in the Virginia countryside. Unknown to the author, her husband possessed a dark side that soon emerged. Chronic depression fueled his rages, followed by physical abuse. After much grief, they entered counseling, salvaging their marriage. Ten years into their marriage, they moved back to Washington, restarting their professional lives. Joynt became a producer for Nightwatch; her husband shouldered the day-to-day management of his legendary restaurant, Nathans. For the next decade, their lives were grand. But in 1997, a month after a sailing vacation to the Caribbean, Joynt’s husband died, and the author’s comfortable life disintegrated. Due to her husband’s fraudulent financial dealings, Joynt discovered she now owed the IRS $3 million in back taxes. “The reality he left us was not enchanting and not safe, but dangerous and frightening,” she writes. The author recounts the misery of the next ten years dealing with the messy details of her long battle with the IRS; her valiant attempts to turn Nathans into a moneymaking enterprise; her constant struggle to retain her demanding job as a producer with Larry King Live; and the joy of raising her son. Excellent recounting of the author’s lost decade, during which she rebuilt her life, became self-sufficient and found peace following her husband’s deceit.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59209-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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