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A FORK IN THE ROAD

Name: A FORK IN THE ROAD
Author: Craig B. Brown
ISBN: 978-1460937617

A STORY OF CHRONIC ILLNESS, FORTITUDE, FAITH AND OUR NATION

by Craig B. Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 27, 2011

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In this memoir, a blind, retired judge revisits his battle with chronic illness and the loss of his sight.

Brown opens his second memoir (Blind Justice, 2009) with the chilling line, “Going blind is like dying except you are still alive.” He then recounts his battle with Behcet’s Syndrome and becoming blind, spanning from his undergraduate days in the Triangle area of North Carolina, to his transition to retirement from the law profession where he was a district court judge, imparting advice from his life experiences along the way. After battling to stave off his impending blindness for more than a decade, Brown must physically and mentally adjust to life as a disabled person and deal with other life changes, or “train wrecks” as he calls them. He delivers some practical advice about handling loss and making good decisions about health care, but his focus could be better controlled and his audience narrowed down in order to avoid alienating some readers. While the book is filled with clichéd phrases, several stand-out lines, such as the opening one, bring emotion to Brown’s ordeal. The chapters alternate between encyclopedia-like recall of people and places associated with his life in Durham and advice for others facing a chronic disease. Photographs interspersed in the text and quotes beginning each chapter feel elementary, but Brown showcases his writing chops in the standout chapter “The Sightless End Game.” In it, he undergoes a series of cataract surgeries with the hope of being able to continue to see the face of his firstborn daughter and eventually memorize the face of his second daughter before he loses his sight completely, and this makes for heartwarming, emotionally charged scenes. The book concludes first with a chapter on Brown’s ideas for decreasing the national debt and then a final chapter on hope and love. While the book’s scope could have benefited from a tighter focus, the memoir has moments where there is much to learn from Brown’s wisdom. An ambitious memoir with a unique viewpoint regarding disabilities and life’s “train wrecks.”

Pub Date: March 27, 2011

ISBN: 978-1460937617

Page Count: 251

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)