by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 26, 2015
Certain to be a successful fundraiser, this somewhat rambling account is jampacked with convincing details of the author’s...
The founder and director of Mary’s Meals tells how that charity began and how it has grown into an organization that feeds hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in countries around the world.
In 1992, MacFarlane-Barrow and his brother, raised in a devout Catholic family in Scotland, drove a truck filled with emergency supplies of food, clothing, and medicine to war-torn Bosnia. They were drawn there after visions of the Virgin Mary had reportedly delivered messages from God so powerful that his parents had converted their hunting lodge to a house of prayer. On their return to Scotland, the emergency relief effort expanded as donations continued to pour into their parents’ shed, and MacFarlane-Barrow was soon working full time managing a charity now registered as Scottish International Relief. Meeting with famine relief officials in Malawi in 2002, the author describes how he was struck by the words of a child who said his dream was to have enough to eat and to go to school. SIR began funding school feeding projects in places where poverty and hunger prevented children from going to school. As the author explains, the projects are community-run by volunteers and support the local economy, while the inducement of a free meal brings in children who would not otherwise get an education. In 2012, SIR changed its name to Mary’s Meals, naming it after the Virgin Mary. Writing with enthusiasm, humility, and seemingly bottomless optimism and goodwill, MacFarlane-Barrow shares credit generously with those who shaped his vision and helped him along the way. Quotations that open each chapter generally feature the words of religious figures, but Yeats and Lincoln also appear.
Certain to be a successful fundraiser, this somewhat rambling account is jampacked with convincing details of the author’s experiences and portraits of people he admires.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-813270-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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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