An inspiring yet relatable true story with exciting scenes and plenty of heart.
A memoir that chronicles a former businesswoman’s quest to scale the highest of New Hampshire’s mountains.
Suchors (co-author: Own Your Own Cable System, 1983) graduated from Harvard Business School in the late 1970s and moved up the corporate ladder before marrying, launching a successful consulting business, and starting a family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She grew up with alcoholic parents and a beloved but challenging older sister with Down syndrome; she also felt pressure to excel at all costs, without ever asking for help. When she was still reeling from her mother’s death, she met her neighbor Kate, a fellow wife, mother, and feminist, and the two formed a close bond. Both novice hikers, they learned of the Four Thousand Footer Club, an elite society consisting of members who’d scaled the 48 mountains in New Hampshire over 4,000 feet high. The two women made this achievement their goal and grew closer as they pursued intense training regimens that included climbing up and down stairways at a local public-transit station, learning how to pack hiking necessities while avoiding extra weight, and relying heavily on the Appalachian Mountain Club’s White Mountain Guide, which they referred to as their “bible.” Over the years, several other women became involved in the quest to varying degrees: Suchors’ personal trainer Cathy, her college friend Sarah, and Ginny, a choral master. After tragedy struck, the author was more determined than ever to climb the 48. Suchors’ journey feels authentic, and her writing, gleaned from journals she kept over the years, brings to vivid life a proud and driven woman, her staunch support network, and her vibrant, intelligent best friend and soul mate. She evocatively explains how every early alarm clock, hiking-boot print, and summit happy dance makes her think of her relationship with her friend. Throughout, her prose radiates a sense of determination: “Mt. Tripyramid would push me to my limits.…No matter. Though I might be a month shy of forty-eight and potentially a fool for giving up a lucrative business career to write a novel, I would complete this ‘event.’ ”
An inspiring yet relatable true story with exciting scenes and plenty of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-473-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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