An affecting but uneven memoir of addiction and overcoming despair.
A young woman narrates the story of her struggles with anorexia.
In her debut memoir, Weber describes her process of battling—and healing from—anorexia. The account begins when she and her twin brother, Corbin, left their home in Texas and moved with their family to Singapore. Corbin struggled to adjust, acting out and cutting himself. This took its toll on the entire family and left Weber feeling alienated and neglected. Psychologically fragile, she realized that being thin attracted the positive attention she craved. She developed an eating disorder, which slowly and insidiously subsumed her life. The process of acknowledging and managing her disease upended her life as she became an expert at hiding the extent of her starvation from her family and boyfriend; she repeatedly lied to her nutritionist about how much she was (and wasn’t) eating, straining her relationships until her health reached a crisis point. Weber has an important, frightening story to tell, and some of the details she shares are enlightening. For example, she describes the disorder as her “monster,” a voice that constantly undermined her and controlled her thoughts. The prose, however, drifts toward the distractingly florid, especially when describing Weber’s relationship with her boyfriend, Curtis: “I thought I caught a glimpse of a storm cloud on the horizon of our fairy tale’s powder blue skies.” Also distracting are some of the black-and-white photographs that Weber includes of herself and her friends and family; they seem superfluous and remove the reader from the flow of the narrative. The exceptions are the photos that show just how dangerously thin she became.
An affecting but uneven memoir of addiction and overcoming despair.Pub Date: May 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-2940-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
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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