A welcome and heartfelt effort. We eagerly await the day when Giffords herself can more fully flesh out her story.
Moving, sometimes belabored memoir, mostly by astronaut Kelly, of Giffords' miraculous recovery after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt.
That shooting, in Tucson on Jan. 8, 2011, left Giffords with a massive head wound and severe trauma to the brain. Nonetheless, as most readers know, she bravely returned to the floor of Congress to cast her vote in the last budget battle. By summer she was well enough, Kelly reveals, that she was able to give map directions in her hometown. Yet the road to recovery has been grueling and sometimes dispiriting: “ ‘It’s awful,’ Gabby will say, and I have to agree with her.” Of the shooter himself, so much in the news, we learn little in these pages; understandably, it seems that Kelly and Giffords do not wish to accord him any space in their book. What they offer instead is a detailed, sometimes diary-like record of recovery that is nothing but inspirational, as well as an account of a marriage of two ambitious and extremely busy people. Kelly is evenhanded, but he clearly places some responsibility for his wife’s shooting on the overheated politics of the day. Her opponent was fond of hoisting automatic weapons as a sign of his toughness, while Sarah Palin placed rifle-scope targets on Giffords’ district. Even after the shooting, politics prevailed. Kelly notes that while former President George H.W. Bush, who was out of office long before Giffords entered politics, made efforts to visit her in the hospital, Speaker of the House John Boehner did not, even when he was in Houston for other reasons. Kelly’s prose—how much he owes to near–ghost writer Zaslow we do not know—is mostly workmanlike; the only spark we get is when we hear Giffords in her own words, as when she notes simply, “It was hard but I’m alive…I will get stronger. I will return.” And there are many moments that don’t seem to have a place except as filler, mostly having to do with Kelly’s experiences before the couple met.
A welcome and heartfelt effort. We eagerly await the day when Giffords herself can more fully flesh out her story.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6106-4
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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