A timely, inspiring memoir.
The former San Antonio mayor and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development tells the story of how he rose from humble origins to live the American dream.
Born to Chicano activist parents, Castro and his twin brother, Joaquín, grew up in a household where both were taught “the importance of political engagement” from an early age. They also grew up imbibing the “trifecta of…religion, cooking and stories” provided to them by their Mexican grandmother, who had first crossed into the United States as an orphan in the early 1920s. Their father eventually left the family; undaunted, Castro’s mother completed a master’s program in urban studies and worked at an internship with the City of San Antonio while raising her sons and caring for an aging mother. The difficulties the brothers faced at home forced them to learn “how to support each other without a parent around” and helped them overcome their ongoing rivalry. Determined to fulfill their mother’s wishes that they “reach as high as [they] possibly could,” they graduated high school near the top of their class and entered Stanford University. There, they continued to excel and won election to the student senate. Before the brothers went on to attend Harvard Law School, the author briefly taught high school in San Antonio in a working-class Mexican-American neighborhood similar to the ones he had known as a child. The experience left him determined to use his education to help ordinary citizens and especially Mexican-Americans. He and Joaquín returned to San Antonio to work as lawyers and begin careers in politics. Joaquín went on to win a seat in the House of Representatives while the author became mayor and then joined the Barack Obama administration as HUD secretary. Eloquent in its simplicity, Castro’s book offers a moving account of immigrant success that seeks to encourage all Americans to continue the fight against government injustice toward immigrants.
A timely, inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-25216-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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