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HOW'S YOUR FAITH?

AN UNLIKELY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

Intermittently enjoyable but a lightweight, unfocused case study of an interfaith family.

Finding faith in the media fast lane.

Former Meet the Press moderator Gregory provides his life’s story, with an emphasis on his search for faith. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, the author’s youth was marked by his parents’ divorce and his mother’s alcoholism. He describes these years in depth before moving on to his early career in journalism, during which he met his future wife, Beth. After this introduction, Gregory moves on to the topic of his faith life, something he had thought little about until his marriage to a Christian. When the couple discussed how to raise their children, they decided to raise them as Jews, as this was culturally important to the author. His wife, however, had no plans to convert to Judaism. This interfaith parenting decision serves as a source of tension throughout the remainder of the book. Gregory moves on to detail his complex relationship with President George W. Bush. While he normally faced Bush in the role of journalist, the president was also prone to interact with the author in very personal ways, asking him on occasion, “How is your faith?” and discussing questions of religious belief. Gregory recounts his eventual departure from NBC: “My faith had strengthened me so that I knew I could take the hit, and thrive, even if I was not on television.” The author discusses interfaith marriage in America, including the view from an Islamic friend. Though Gregory has an interesting life story, and the book will appeal to TV news junkies, it is not without its flaws. The author distracts from his core message with excessive analysis and loose storytelling, and the writing is less than polished, more suitable to a magazine article or news copy than a full book.

Intermittently enjoyable but a lightweight, unfocused case study of an interfaith family.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4516-5160-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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INTO THE WILD

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.

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)

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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