A deeply felt, unforgettable story that will linger in readers’ imaginations.
A writer returns home to work at his family’s farm in rural Ireland and records day-to-day struggles and triumphs throughout his first season.
In this thoughtfully observed and poignant debut memoir, Connell paints a remarkably authentic portrait of farm life in all its harshness and beauty. His story begins in January as he is about to deliver his first calf on his own. He describes the long, painstakingly intense procedure before he successfully delivered the calf, followed by the equally difficult task of helping the newborn to feed. This experience sets the tone for the engrossing narrative that follows, as Connell recounts the many challenging moments he faced over the next several months. These included the births and deaths of various livestock, endless feeding and cleaning, and protecting the animals from varied and unpredictable forces of nature. “The work is so relentless that I have forgotten I have lived other lives or that other lives exist,” writes Connell. “There is only the yard and cows and the mountain of chores before me.” The author also shares his internal struggle with his identity and family, in particular the difficult ties with his father, who has been mentor and guide and occasionally his harshest critic. Connell returned to the farm following a 10-year absence working as a journalist and film producer and living abroad, all the while preserving a longing for the farm life he left behind and struggling through periods of depression. Though the author vividly depicts the many hardships and grueling labor involved in running a farm, he maintains an open reverence for the intrinsic value of these efforts and a deep compassion for the animals and environment. “Farming,” he writes, “is a walk with survival, with death over our shoulder, sickness to our left, the spirit to our right and the joy of new life in front.”
A deeply felt, unforgettable story that will linger in readers’ imaginations.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-57799-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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