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YOUR FATHER’S VOICE

Name: YOUR FATHER’S VOICE
Author: Lyz Glick
ISBN: 0-312-31921-5

LETTERS FOR EMMY ABOUT LIFE WITH JEREMY--AND WITHOUT HIM AFTER 9/11

by Lyz Glick & Dan Zegart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2004

An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary...

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In another poignant addition to the literary legacy of 9/11, a young widow recalls for their infant daughter the father she will never know.

Alternating an account of her experiences after husband Jeremy died on Flight 93 with memories of their first meeting and subsequent relationship, Glick has produced an act of preservation as much as of mourning. Determined that their daughter Emmy, three months old when he died, should know her father, Glick recollects all the details she hopes will give a sense of Jeremy: his love of sport, especially judo, the way he’d sneak out of the house to see his friends, their roller-coaster relationship, and his success as a salesman. She recalls the day in 1984 when she first sat next to him in ninth-grade biology. She disliked Jeremy’s enormous Afro, which she thought made him look like a cannibal, but she enjoyed his sense of humor, and the two soon became friends. They sometimes dated, sometimes broke up for long periods of time, especially in college, but they always stayed in touch, either personally or through Jeremy’s many friends. They married in 1996 and three years later bought a lakeside home in New Jersey, where Glick, who had experienced a number of miscarriages, finally became pregnant with Emmy. As she records their past, she also describes the period following 9/11: her grief; the stress of dealing with the media; interviews with FBI; her several visits to the White House, where she met with President Bush. Therapy sessions joined her with other women who had lost loved ones that day, but nothing really prepared her for such harrowing experiences as receiving Jeremy’s few remains (teeth and a datebook) and listening to the tape from the Flight 93 black box.

An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary families.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-312-31921-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)