An inspiring tale of how one woman’s beliefs enabled her to escape severe dysfunction.
This tale chronicles a challenging chapter in Messenger’s life, when she found herself trapped in and then emerging from a toxic relationship.
During the early days of her prolific writing career, Messenger (Walking With Angels, 2013), an incest survivor, was recovering from a breakup. In need of companionship, she lowered her defenses. Joseph sought out Messenger to help write his book about how a Colorado sheriff was actually a serial killer. The pair were drawn physically to each other, and they quickly became a couple. The two were polar opposites: Messenger was spiritual, optimistic, and nurturing; Joey was uncouth, negative, and narcissistic. Joey, says the author, was soon mooching off the financially strapped Messenger, then a temp office worker, to support his drinking and gambling. Still, despite the psychological abuse by the self-absorbed Joey, Messenger couldn’t end the relationship, in part because she could find the good in anybody. Instead, she vented about him when alone in her apartment: “No one has ever treated me as unkindly as you! You are completely unreliable!” Eventually she came to the realization that she needed to escape the self-destructive circumstances: “I must take care of myself, for a while shut out the world, forget Joey and all the pain that came with him.” Even after she kicked out Joey, she lived in fear that he would return to upset the life she was trying to rebuild. Throughout the book, Messenger smoothly weaves in the difficulties from her past via flashbacks to help readers understand how she ended up in this psychologically damaging pairing. It’s also evident how the author’s New-Age beliefs and her wide circle of friends sustained her through this trying, six-month ordeal. Messenger’s harrowing cautionary tale ably urges those in similar situations to heed warning signs.
An inspiring tale of how one woman’s beliefs enabled her to escape severe dysfunction.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5187-5016-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Messenger Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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