A thoughtful, multithemed autobiography focused on the challenges of motherhood, with particular insight into health care...
In this memoir, a former aspiring actress chronicles her transformative journey dealing with a daughter’s brain tumor and a later-in-life foreign adoption.
In 1972, depressed and financially dependent on a husband she was in the process of divorcing, Goodman, then 35, was told that her 5-year-old daughter, Julie, had a brain tumor and likely only six months to live. Julie underwent brain surgery and radiation treatment, then chemotherapy, leaving her neurologically disabled. Defying doctors, Goodman tried patterning, a controversial therapy of manipulating body parts to stimulate motor development. She recruited volunteers to help perform this work in her New York City apartment, and Julie lived, with some improvement, for another 20 years. Goodman also realized she was gay; she had one long-term lesbian relationship and eventually abandoned her “frivolous dream of being an actress” for a new career as a hospital counselor. In her 50s, Goodman, once again single, adopted Cache, a 3-year-old girl from Guatemala, who ended up having behavioral issues due to early childhood abuse and, later, sexual trauma as an 11-year-old. Goodman sprang into action, sending Cache to wilderness camp and boarding school. While Goodman remains unsure of these decisions, Cache, whose writings are excerpted in this narrative, is now back home and exploring a makeup artist career. In her often heartbreaking account, Goodman makes note of the cantor’s reference at Julie’s funeral to the Jewish legend about “a mother who did everything possible to keep her child alive.” Goodman is indeed living proof of such dedication, an example to parents everywhere to stay engaged in their children’s care. Though at times digressive with extraneous personal detail, Goodman is also refreshingly honest about the hardships in her life. “I…was always amazed that there was more screaming left,” she says about her primal scream therapy. Among her range of experiences—Julie, Cache, her sexual identity—each episode could be the subject of a more finely tuned memoir. This impressive individual, however, has certainly earned the right to tell her story in its totality.
A thoughtful, multithemed autobiography focused on the challenges of motherhood, with particular insight into health care advocacy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494294441
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
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
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