A highly readable story of illness, treatment, and its impact on a family.
A mother’s memoir of her son’s illness and early death.
In this debut memoir, Frare recounts the story of her son Christopher, who survived a heart transplant at the age of 15 and died of cancer at the age of 22. Portions of the narrative are in Christopher’s words, drawn from essays and recordings he made over the course of his illness, and in the introduction, Frare explains her decision to list him as a co-author. As a cardiology-focused nurse, Frare found herself in a difficult position when her son was diagnosed with heart failure. She was aware of the dangers but too involved for a nurse’s traditional detachment: “The physicians expected me to be so clinical, calm, and cool. Do CPR on my own son? Were they kidding me?” Frare often writes with emotion, but an occasional stark sentence also works well, as when she offers a taste of her son’s postoperative medication regimen: “Twenty-one horse pills that smelled like skunk were the main ones, and the rest of the pills counteracted their bad side effects.” Christopher’s health continued to be uneven as he finished high school and started college, though his drug and alcohol use often tested the limits of his family’s sympathy. He got himself under control but soon after was diagnosed with cancer, which was ultimately fatal. Frare heartbreakingly ties Christopher’s story into her own process of grief, recovery, and redemption. Excerpts from Christopher’s journal present the authentic voice of a teenage boy aware that he was fighting the odds and also resentful about the end of his normal childhood: “I went to the hospital, and six weeks later I got the most worthless piece of shit contraption—a pacemaker. It totally ended my football career.” “My parents dread these periods” of his feeling unusually good and energetic, he later wrote, “not because I am feeling better but because this reinforces my existing teenage invincibility, and I listen to nothing my parents tell me.”
A highly readable story of illness, treatment, and its impact on a family.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1502997326
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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