A memoir of an admirable, faith-based life, but one that ultimately provides little insight into its author.
Waken (My Home Sweet Home: Surviving an Abusive Relationship, 2013) offers a memoir about how unshakable faith carried her through decades of joy and family turmoil.
Following the death of her abusive husband, the author navigates life as a single mother with four children. Waken documents her life in close detail from the early 1960s through the first decade of the new millennium, crediting her Christian faith with giving her the strength to endure challenges great and small—including supporting her family, her son’s near-fatal car accident when he was 17, and moving from Michigan to Alaska at the age of 55. She gives equal weight to life-changing and mundane moments of her life, often pausing to reflect on small blessings: “It is my home sweet home, no matter how humble. I am thankful for a job so I can afford a place to live and have food to eat. Thank you, Lord, You have provided for me and my family for many years.” It’s easy to admire Waken’s humility and her gumption; her memoir details her grace under pressure and her frequent travels to help her family members through myriad struggles. However, the cast of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews and friends who pop in and out of Waken’s story quickly start to blend together. The book often reads more like a personal journal than a memoir, and provides little scene-setting or characterization. Waken frequently mentions the beauty of her beloved Alaska, but provides few descriptive details to place readers there. Likewise, although the book ends with a tragic loss, Waken dedicates more time to outlining the relevant facts of the event than exploring her feelings about the loss and its impact. The book will likely appeal primarily to a Christian audience, who may be more willing to overlook some of its narrative flaws.
A memoir of an admirable, faith-based life, but one that ultimately provides little insight into its author.Pub Date: July 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483662770
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
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
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