Fearless, enduring story of human fragility and strength.
Intensely raw memoir of a reformed Neo-Nazi.
Meeink spent most of his childhood being knocked around in South Philly by his stepfather and running from gangs between his bus stop and his grade school. By age 20, the author was the leader of Strike Force, a local chapter of the Aryan Nation. “I felt the rage boiling inside me until I thought I was going to puke or scream or die…We are footsoldiers in God’s army. Right. Left. We are the enforcers of God’s law. Right. Left. Our race is our fucking religion,” he writes. He had already had his own cable-access show, escaped from a mental institution, been to prison and attempted suicide on more than one occasion. Since skinheads associate drug use—not including alcohol—with minorities, Meeink was vehemently opposed to using drugs. However, as soon as he left the “movement,” without the Neo-Nazi ethos and peer pressure to keep him in check, Meeink floundered into a daily drug habit, supplied at first by his addled mother. He is now a recovering skinhead and a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. His debut is a boot-stamping march through desperation, hate, violence and salvation, covering his rise to skinhead stardom and his eventual recovery from his destructive vices. Since 1995, the author has been teaching children and young adults about the consequences of conformity and the regrets of a misspent youth. He runs Harmony through Hockey, a community-outreach program endorsed by the Philadelphia Flyers that teaches children the values of unity and equality. It is through his organization that Meeink’s gentler side takes over, demonstrating how much a strong will can be misdirected with hatred and how difficult it can be to redirect it with love. Indelicate and harsh, but never preachy or whiny, this is an intimate, uncompromising memoir. Though it hits some predictable notes—mostly because of Edward Norton’s familiar character in American History X—it speaks forcefully from experience.
Fearless, enduring story of human fragility and strength.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9790188-2-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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