Despite occasional snags, this spiritual account delivers a brisk, sincere look at a volatile life.
A debut memoir chronicles one woman’s tumultuous coming-of-age in California.
Harte begins her story with a traumatic event in 1995. The author awoke with trouble speaking. She was soon rushed to the hospital with difficulty breathing. Before it was all over, she suffered cardiac arrest and experienced a vision of hell with its terrible sounds of “people screaming from unimaginable torture.” Readers are then taken back to Harte’s early days. She grew up in Florida in the 1960s. Her parents separated while she was still young, though she got along well with her stepfather. She also spent summers with her grandparents on Long Island. Later, she dropped out of college after a few months and went to live with her wealthy, eccentric father in California. There, she experimented with drugs, become pregnant at the age of 19, and married her first husband while he was still in jail. Her adult life would involve plenty of time at the beach, rocky relationships, and even a foray into acting. Through the ups and downs, she eventually found herself drawn to Christianity and the idea of serving others. She would go on to volunteer with a charity group in Africa and be deeply touched by her experiences there. The story of Harte’s life moves in a swift, casual manner. “Let me explain,” the author asserts before revealing how she discovered she was married to an alcoholic. And while the informal tone is inviting, certain portions are more captivating than others. Harte’s struggles to get rid of a shoddy home in Malibu are not quite as memorable as, say, her recollections of life with a father who chose to wear a different color jumpsuit every day. But most notable are the many important lessons she learned. Does the author regret her decision to drop out of college, move to California, and become a mother at such a young age? As she points out, “Maybe no matter where life takes you, the experiences are the same; just the players are different.” In the end, her bumpy path has made her the adult she is today. Her final advice is simple yet earnest: “There is hope for everyone.”
Despite occasional snags, this spiritual account delivers a brisk, sincere look at a volatile life.Pub Date: March 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4008-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2019
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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