by Cecily McMillan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016
A revealing memoir, though one that perhaps reveals aspects of the author’s character she didn't intend to showcase.
In her first book, Occupy Wall Street protester McMillan tells the story of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment and the personal history that shaped her activism.
On St. Patrick’s Day in 2012, McMillan, then a graduate student and nanny, was arrested for elbowing a police officer in the eye during a celebration of the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in New York’s Zuccotti Park. She was convicted and spent 58 days in the jail at Rikers Island. Her outraged memoir lingers over the night of the arrest and the trial while skimming over her time in jail, which led her to a new role as an advocate for prison reform. The activist claims that she just stopped by the park for a few minutes to meet up with a friend, after a long evening of bar-hopping with another friend, and that she was assaulted by a police officer there and went into a series of seizures that left her with only scattered memories of the night. Her blow-by-blow account of the trial—during which, she writes, her lawyers were “saints, for sure,” the judge “made it abundantly clear that he didn’t like me or my lawyers,” and McMillan dressed and made herself up to look like “Activist Barbie”—is peppered with exclamation points and full of outrage. The book opens with a long and not particularly enlightening description of the author’s youth, in which she bounced among the homes of her divorced parents, her grandparents, and a teacher who was temporarily willing to take her in after she emancipated herself at 16. Behavioral problems caused her to be kicked out of one home after another. In her account, other people are shadowy figures that seem to exist only insofar as they impact her life positively or negatively.
A revealing memoir, though one that perhaps reveals aspects of the author’s character she didn't intend to showcase.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-538-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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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