The founder of the nonprofit organization Wine to Water gives a highly personal account of how he came to that mission and of the work that it is doing today.
The organization, which raises awareness of the need for clean water around the world and helps to provide that water to people in need, began as an idea in the head of a young man with a talent for connecting with people and a growing awareness of the world's water problems. A biker, bartender and amateur musician with no apparent goal in life, Hendley organized a wine tasting as a fundraiser for clean-water projects and shortly thereafter found himself in contact with Samaritan's Purse, an international charitable organization. That meeting led to a job in Darfur, where he built up a team that delivered water and repaired wells in villages devastated by the genocidal attacks. The author’s down-to-earth accounts of his time there in 2004 and 2005 are interspersed with on-the-spot e-mail updates to friends, family and supervisors. His frustrations and the psychological impact of his observations and harrowing experiences are clear. On his return to the United States, Hendley married and took a mundane office job but never stopped trying to get Wine to Water up and running. With a colleague from his Darfur year, he succeeded, and through their grassroots network they began to spread their wings, undertaking water projects around the world. Although he describes several projects in India and Africa, he gives greatest attention to his work in post-earthquake Haiti, where he put to good use his knowledge of how to cut through red tape and get things done. Hendley's well-told story—at times a bit aw-shucks, down-homey in tone—demonstrates how one person can impact the lives of many. Though not written specifically for teenage boys, it would make a great gift for a too-cool-for-school kid.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58333-462-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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