A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.
The widower of murdered pop star Selena reveals poignant details of their short time together as a couple.
In the early 1990s, Selena Quintanilla shook up the world of Tejano, a hybrid of Mexican and American music, by fronting an energetic young band that included guitarist Chris Perez. Initially more interested in Selena’s strong voice and the band’s innovative take on tradition than in romance, Perez soon found himself falling head over heels for Selena. Perez portrays his girlfriend and eventual wife—they eloped in 1992 after growing weary of concealing their relationship from Selena’s overly protective father—as a spirited daredevil with a heart of gold. She was an animal lover, motorcycle enthusiast and emerging fashion designer whose religious beliefs grounded her within the chaotic music industry. Unfortunately, Selena’s trusting nature led her to welcome a dangerous woman, Yolanda Saldivar, into her inner circle. As Selena’s fan-club president and personal assistant, Saldivar soon proved to be unstable, manipulative and larcenous. Perez calls her a “cancer,” an epithet that would turn out to be tragically apt when Saldivar killed Selena in 1995, shooting her in the back and causing internal bleeding. Recounting the day that Selena died as well as the ensuing funeral, Perez captures these events in heartbreaking detail. At one point, he writes, he wanted nothing more than to crawl into the coffin with her and pull down the lid. Given Perez’s easygoing, confidential tone throughout the book, this image carries an emotional weight that it would not have had coming from a melodramatic storyteller. The ending of the book feels somewhat rushed, though, as Perez duly notes his descent into depression and substance abuse, his rebound and his eventual remarriage and fatherhood.
A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-41404-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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