by Judy Batalion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016
A sinuous, overstuffed reflection on living with a hoarder.
One woman's struggle to find her identity after growing up in a hoarder family.
From an early age, Batalion, a former comedian and art curator, knew there was something odd about her mother and the way she kept buying things and never throwing anything away. Yet, the moldering cans of tuna, the insect-infested flour, the piles of clothing, papers, telephones, fax machines, and every trinket imaginable felt like home, even if they threatened to overwhelm her. “When mom slept,” she writes, “the house could breathe. The walls exhaled, the roof slumped.” Ultimately, Batalion craved peace, order, and minimalism, things she could only begin to find when she finally left home and began her adult life. Told in often overwhelming detail, as if she's hoarding each event and word, the author traces her life story from early childhood, when she suffered from colitis, to her college years, when she experimented with various fashion styles and sex, to her unexpected rise to motherhood. She meanders through her family's Jewish heritage, bringing in memories of her Bubbie and of her mother's increasing paranoia and threats of suicide, juxtaposing them against her struggles to find herself amid her increasing obsessive-compulsive behaviors. The writing is dense, fraught with anxiety, and jumps back and forth in time, leaving readers with a bit of the bloat, as if there's too much information provided without a clear narrative line. Although Batalion tries to show how her connections to her grandmother, mother, and daughter have influenced her life, the circuitous route she takes leaves us wondering just what it is that she's trying to say. However, the descriptions of life in a hoarder home leave nothing to the imagination, making this a good read for those who may wonder if they have a hoarder in their midst.
A sinuous, overstuffed reflection on living with a hoarder.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47311-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: NAL
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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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