In replaying his watch over the last six years of his parents' lives as they become ever more infirm, Taylor (Ordinary Miracles, 1993; Sins of the Father, 1989, etc.) reminds us of Shakespeare's warning that ``death, a necessary end,/Will come when it will come.'' Death is easy. What's hard is dying, as we see in this saddening memoir of how Taylor faced the challenge of aging and retired parents, once skilled professionals now on a shrunken income. A nest egg dwindles; health flakes away and flies off in small pieces. While Taylor writes with great restraint, he seldom subjects himself (or us) to that intensity or terrible immediacy once so shocking in Hemingway, who saw each detail as if on the last day of his life. A married, middle-aged, freelance New York journalist, Nick has sold a book to the movies and is writing a script that somehow seems to support his endless plane trips to North Carolina, Florida, and Mexico to help his parents arrange their housekeeping and finances. Most frustrating to him is that no act of his—however sensitive and keenly thought through—really fulfills his parents' needs or brings about a sense of lasting satisfaction in him: only delayed guilt. As with trying to adjust to the minds of a pair of drunks or addicts, something's always wrong. Time after time, he must hurry back to their loving but surprised smiles as once more he lends a hand and shores up a splitting dike. Meanwhile, some of his friends go through problems much like his, so that we see a culture of middle-aged earners caring for parents stricken with Alzheimer's or worse. As one reads, and as Nick focuses on his parents, a reader can't help foreseeing infirmities of one's own. The ``necessary end'' has some horrible side effects before it comes. A heartbreaker about caring, with no easy answers.
Pub Date: March 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47102-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
