A moving, valuable inside view of an often misunderstood profession.
A Christian author (Around Our Town, 2011) recounts her career as a child-protective social worker in this memoir.
Skinner—a wife and mother, a former teacher, and a former foster parent—learned in the 1990s that there was a need for mentors of inexperienced parents, and she decided that she could help. She was ultimately hired as a full-time social worker, and she spent 23 years, in the states of Texas and Arkansas, specializing in foster and adoptive placements; along the way, she investigated physical and sexual abuse cases and led group-therapy sessions for male sex offenders. Skinner calls her memories her “cleansing breaths,” and as she recounts them, she describes how her own personality quirks and reliance on prayer guided and complicated her job. Her career took her in unexpected directions and often placed her at odds with the bureaucracy of child protective services and the attorneys appointed to represent the children. She recounts many triumphs, however, such as taking underfed children to McDonald’s for the first time, getting a violent child to trust her, and urging a mother to face the truth about a stepfather’s abuse. But the deeply religious author also admits that she “struggled” with the notion of placing children in non-Christian homes—which, for her, even included those of Mormons; even so, she still managed to form a good working relationship with a Wiccan group facilitator. Black-and-white drawings by Skinner’s daughter accompany most of the 12 chapters, and sidebars delve deeper into professional jargon and on-the-job observations. Skinner, a conservative Christian, emerges in the text as a compassionate, fair-minded professional who made placements based on what she thought was the best possible outcome for the children. She also has much to say about what she sees as counterproductive policies and bureaucratic red tape and also how TV programs, such as Judging Amy, have misled the public about her profession. At times, her folksy style moves at a slow pace, and she occasionally unnecessarily repeats herself. However, she’s scrupulous to admit her personal biases and acknowledge the times when her sympathies affected her judgments.
A moving, valuable inside view of an often misunderstood profession.Pub Date: July 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-5607-7
Page Count: 228
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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