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DIBS AND DABS OF MY LIFE

Name: DIBS AND DABS OF MY LIFE
Author: Gertrude Coulter
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7029-2

by Gertrude Coulter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2017

A concise memoir that relies more on main points than engaging memories.

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A debut author recounts her life in Tennessee, from a Depression-era childhood to her 70th high school reunion.

Coulter can remember growing up in Memphis at a time when “anyone could walk around the block after dark without feeling afraid; most children lived in two-parent homes; children walked to neighborhood schools.” Throughout her childhood, just before and during the Depression, Coulter watched her grandmother wring chickens’ necks for dinner, saw the arrival of the first electric refrigerator, and disrupted school with her rambunctious twin brother, Jim. After her high school graduation in 1945, Coulter married a man named Thurman in a home wedding ceremony. Four children later, she would come to realize that Thurman was both unfaithful and abusive. By 1958, she had divorced her husband and struck out on her own with three of the children (the fourth was enrolled in college): “I listened to his excuses, alibis, and promises, all of which I had heard before.” As a 30-year-old single mother, Coulter attended Memphis State College to become a teacher and moved her family to the small town of Lepanto. “Small towns were something at that time,” she writes of starting work as a teacher without even a college degree. But it ended up being a great decision in her life—eventually she would earn a degree and go on to become a principal. The author follows her story all the way through the sad loss of one of her adult children, her adventures camping across the country, and her 70th high school reunion, offering some rich details and a scattering of photographs. But Coulter’s short, sweet book covers so much information over so many years that it starts to feel more like an overview than a true memoir: “It was a very busy year. Wayne and his girlfriend, Sandy, got married; I had two new grandbabies; I attended a three-week workshop; and my father passed away.” Though her prose is always endearing, Coulter never strays too far from the facts, sometimes leaving out the emotions of her incredible tale.

A concise memoir that relies more on main points than engaging memories.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7029-2

Page Count: 62

Publisher: Westbow Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)