An emotionally compelling and ultimately optimistic remembrance.
Registered nurse and life coach Odgers’ debut memoir depicts her struggle and determination to move forward after multiple devastating tragedies.
While living in San Diego in the late 1970s, the author met her future husband, Bruce, a U.S. Navy pilot. They were married in 1979, and he later became a pilot for Delta Airlines. The couple moved to Plano, Texas, where their three sons were born. In 1992, they moved to Ramona, California, where they had “9.3 acres” overlooking the Santa Maria Valley. Bruce designed every aspect of their custom-built house as meticulously as he approached his career as a pilot. But 15 years later, in 2007, Santa Ana winds attacked with a vengeance, and a wildfire swept through town. Odgers’ beautiful home and all of its contents were destroyed—and this was only the first in a series of tragic events. The author writes in her introduction that just one year later, “in a span of eight weeks, I lost my husband, my father, and my youngest son” in “traumatic ways.” In separate chapters, Odgers writes movingly about each of her deceased family members, describing in detail her evolving and unique relationships with each one over the course of their lives. She also effectively defines the particular contours of her grief in each instance, which range from crushing pain to sad acceptance. The book is essentially several short, separate vignettes that, taken together, paint a heartbreaking portrait of love and loss. The final two chapters are infused with joy, however, detailing how she found the resilience to rebuild her life and find a new love. Now, she says, she’s ready to share her story in order to offer encouragement to others who may be navigating grief: “Don’t stay in the fertile rut of victimhood,” she writes. A satisfying complement of family photos helps fill in the narrative.
An emotionally compelling and ultimately optimistic remembrance.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73409-390-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Kings Park Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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