Deeply moving, extraordinarily thought-provoking and entirely humane.
A meaningful portrayal of how tragedy affected and transformed one family and especially one religious leader.
Sherman, a rabbi in upstate New York, points to a single day in March 1986 as the point at which his family’s life was forever altered. His son, Eyal, was found to have a lesion in the brainstem. Given no hope for recovery without aggressive treatment, doctors attempted an ambitious surgery, which kept Eyal alive but left him a quadriplegic. It was the beginning of three decades of traumatic health issues, lengthy hospital stays, and daily, mundane care needs stretching around the clock. Sherman does not set out merely to tell his son’s story, or even that of him and his family. Instead, he emphasizes how this experience has transformed them, how it has shaped him as a man of faith and how it has thoroughly changed how he understands other people. Though Sherman describes many situations filled with heartbreaking pain, fear and even monotony, his true focus is on community. He examines the relationships within his family and how his son’s very life is a precious gift. He also explores his congregation, looking at how they have helped each other (and at times stumbled) and how his ministry to others has grown deeper through difficult experiences. Lastly, Sherman focuses on the larger community—e.g., total strangers who treated them with extraordinary kindness or those of other religions and walks of life with whom he has been able to bond. Throughout, Sherman ties his narrative to his faith, exploring how everything he has experienced, from anger to joy, is mirrored in Scripture. “When I heard Eyal’s terrible prognosis, my life was shattered,” he writes. “But eventually, as Moses did, I got up and climbed the mountain again.”
Deeply moving, extraordinarily thought-provoking and entirely humane.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5616-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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