An edifying blend of American history and personal reflection.
Debut author Castle recounts a life devoted to social activism in the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s.
Castle was born in Detroit, a fourth-generation American of Irish-German lineage. She was raised Catholic, lobbied to be sent to a Catholic high school, and was encouraged to consider becoming a nun. After she graduated high school, she worked for the Ford Motor Company and married Don, a charismatic engineer she met through the local church. She threw herself headlong into domestic life—she had six children before she was 30—but was increasingly disenchanted by the limitations of her “mundane domestic routine.” Also, she was moved by the civil rights movement and inspired by the fearless rhetoric of Father Bill Cunningham, who taught that an authentic Christian morality demands both a commitment to human equality and a devotion to the protection of society’s most vulnerable and abused. After the 1967 race riots in Detroit, Castle understood that radical social activism was necessary and would function as the driving purpose of her life: “I began to understand that there was a deeper need for social justice that responded to the realities in the black community, justice that considered the plight of blacks at the hands of the dominant race and the law-and-order, racist police who ruled over their communities.” Her marriage wouldn’t survive, but she began an unlikely but successful relationship with Mike Hamlin, an activist deeply embedded within the Black Power movement, with whom she would help found the Control, Conflict, and Change Book Club, a group devoted to fostering collaborative efforts between blacks and whites. Castle writes astutely about the extraordinary difficulties that confront activism and includes an “activist’s survival guide” that distills the chief lessons of her own experience. She also writes affectingly of her defection from the Catholic Church and her deep misgivings about its failure to live up to its own principles. Finally, her candor is admirable—her wisdom came at the price of her missteps, which she shares with confessional honesty.
An edifying blend of American history and personal reflection.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9886714-0-9
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Against the Tide Books
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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