A strikingly honest, if unevenly written, account of time spent with life and death.
A memoir of one woman’s experiences with tragedy and spirituality.
Debut author Marie’s 11-year-old daughter Emily suddenly died while attending a soccer camp in 1983. The author includes a photo of her open casket, adorned with cloth rainbows and stuffed animals. Marie wondered how she could carry on after such a shocking occurrence, and she explains that she “needed assurance” that Emily “was being cared for in heaven.” This led her to become involved with a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness and to adopt a personal policy to “Let Go and Let God.” She met a man named Jim Daily in 1988 and soon married him; they became close as both followed MSIA techniques and found inspiration in the words of the movement’s founder, John-Roger Hinkins. The author tells of life with Jim in different parts of Alabama, of adopting an anti-inflammatory diet to counter arthritis, and of eventually supporting Jim as he battled cancer. This memoir includes many evocative details, such as how the author accomplished the nearly unthinkable task of piecing together what happened on the last day of her daughter’s life. Other portions of the book, however, are less engaging, such as a list of real estate transactions that she conducted with Jim. The latter is relevant, as the couple moved often in a short period of time, but it provides little in the way of emotional substance. The book is at its most touching when it explores spiritual specifics; for instance, Marie says that every night, she and Jim meditated and “practiced leaving our body, intending to rest in the healing arms of God’s Love.” Some moments rely heavily on MSIA-related language, such as “We held this focus to ask for the Light of Father/Mother/God.” In the end, readers will come to understand how the author met the challenge of meeting death head-on.
A strikingly honest, if unevenly written, account of time spent with life and death.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8751-4
Page Count: 238
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 6, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
