A moving memoir that’s particularly timely given the current health care debate in the United States.
A heart-rending debut nonfiction account of a couple’s struggles with insurance companies as they tried to recover from a catastrophic accident.
In January 2002, a massive tanker-trailer hit Marcia Rhodes’ car from behind, and she suffered a welter of crippling injuries, including irreparable spinal cord damage that left her a paraplegic. Her husband, Harold, in this debut memoir, walks readers through their harrowing story, including the protracted aftermath of Marcia’s medical struggles and the couple’s fight with two insurance companies that were reluctant to reach financial settlements. As the book’s subtitle suggests, the author focuses on their tug of war with these companies and their indefatigable efforts to compel them to pay what they desperately needed to cover onerous medical costs. Rhodes’ depiction of insurance carriers’ cynical money-saving strategies serves as a grim reminder of how toxic the mix of commerce and health care can be. He also illustrates, with painstaking thoroughness, the judicial system’s lamentable limitations and the ballooning costs of health care. Additionally, the couple had to contend with a criminal trial against the driver of the truck, who was charged with negligence. Still, the heart of the book concerns the couple’s battle to manage the emotional fallout of a transformative disaster. For example, after the author asked his wife to politely thank him for his caregiving efforts, he realized the depths of her depression: “She felt that given the way her life was, I was not being reasonable to have these expectations. She was utterly depressed, so just getting through the day was all I could expect. She was perfectly correct. I am not supposed to nag her; I am supposed to love her as she is.” The account of the legal contests can be excruciatingly detailed, and the book’s overall chronological structure, which reads like a diary, can be exhausting. Nevertheless, readers will find this a sad but inspiring story.
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1499543285
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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