A life story told from a unique but relatable perspective.
Bailey recounts his long journey from self-hatred to self-love in this debut memoir.
The author was born to a teenage mother on the South Side of Chicago, and he says that he was abandoned by his father after his mom refused to marry. The author internalized a perceived lack of love, he says, as he was raised by a selfish Baptist-preacher grandfather and a tough single mother. He writes that he was taught to blame himself for other people’s actions against him, and so he never reported the molestation that he suffered at the hands of a babysitter when he was 8. He says that his abuser told him: “If your mom finds out, she’ll kill you.” This emotional baggage, along with low self-esteem stemming from being overweight, created more complications for Bailey. He pursued women from a young age while simultaneously feeling like he was never good enough to be with them: “To say that I had lots of experience with unconditional love, somebody who was always there for me, somebody I could love and who loved me in return, would be a lie,” he writes. As he pursued a career as a Protestant minister and repeatedly attempted to find real love, he was forced to confront his fraught relationships with institutions, women, grief, God, and—most critically—himself. Bailey writes in a conversational style that doesn’t shy away from sentimentality: “I was awestruck, enticed, and later satiated and ravaged. I wanted her, she knew it, and it happened again and again.” His account of his journey is thoughtful and frequently compelling, although his chronological approach is perhaps too inclusive. At one point, for example, he tells of playing Ping-Pong with Cornel West in the student center of Howard University, which sounds fun but doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the story. The religious content is rather light, and Bailey’s struggles with his weight and its bearing on his treatment of women are very common and under-discussed issues among men. As a result, some readers may find inspiration to take a hard look at themselves.
A life story told from a unique but relatable perspective.Pub Date: July 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2685-0
Page Count: 276
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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