by Linda Katherine Cutting ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1997
A concert pianist's soft-pedaled, sensitive memories of the childhood sexual abuse that, combined with her two brothers' suicides, tore her from her music. Cutting's father was a minister who crept into her bedroom while her mother was typing his Sunday sermons. He began his forays (which even took place in his office) at about the same time she began to study the piano—when she was six. Cutting learned to bury her anguish in her music. Her brothers were beaten and abused as well; it was only many years later, after a second brother shot himself and the family publicly reported his death as a car accident, that the extent of her childhood abuse began to surface—and that she began to forget passages of music in long-familiar pieces. Chapters alternate between the 1980s, when she was developing a successful career playing concerts with major orchestras, and the 1990s, when she hospitalized herself as a result of dreams and the ``memory slips'' that interfered with her performances. Cutting kept a journal by her keyboard through the years of her practice; the journal was to record not her musical notes but the thoughts that distracted her from music. Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart play as prominent a part in this memoir as father, mother, brothers, husbands, and therapists. To ``bear witness'' on behalf of her brothers, she confronted her mother, her father, and ultimately the National Congregation of Churches. In some ways, the saddest part—as it often is with stories of incest and abuse—is that no one believed her. And the story that draws quickest sympathy is that of the church janitor who did understand what was happening in the minister's office. Not an expression of outrage or revelation as much as of pain mirrored by detachment, both finding their language in the sharps and flats of the piano keyboard. (First serial to Cosmopolitan; $30,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018730-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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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