A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous (if not excessive) detail.
In this debut memoir, the author steps away from her religion, leading to both severe social consequences and personal fulfillment.
Curtis grew up in Portland in a family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. She was as faithful as could be, incessantly attending meetings and preaching to others, all while successfully pursuing a career at an American bank. She and her equally dedicated husband, Ross, lived happy, faithful lives together until a moment that changed everything. While proselyting, Curtis knocked on the door of a co-worker, and suddenly her message about the impending destruction of nonbelievers just didn’t ring true anymore. The author’s doubts festered and eventually led her to divorce both her husband and her faith. According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, only death or sexual relations with another person can officially end a marriage. Curtis had sex after her divorce, but she kept this to herself. After moving to Chicago, climbing the corporate career even further, and finding fulfillment in other belief systems, she took the final step of confessing her sexual encounters and apostasy to her family and church leaders. The official shunning commenced and has continued to this day, only temporarily suspended for funerals. Curtis has organized her thoughts well and expresses them clearly and entertainingly. No detail of her spiritual, social, and professional journey, however, is too small to share, which stalls momentum. Still, the author’s radical transformation—from dogmatism to relativism and from timidity to self-assurance—unfolds gradually and genuinely. Beyond providing an eye-opening look at her former religious community, this memoir subtly encourages readers to challenge childhood views in search of chosen beliefs.
A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous (if not excessive) detail.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-328-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 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
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