An impressively candid confessional about a woman’s spiritual struggles that lacks in-depth reflection.
An unflinching, life-spanning memoir of transformation after rocky beginnings.
In her nonfiction debut, Adams presents an ambitious review of her entire life. Starting from her 1950s childhood in a seaside Connecticut town, Adams recounts a common fantasy: “I had many hopes and dreams of becoming someone beautiful and that someday my prince would ride up on his white horse.” The rest of the book concerns the various ways that that youthful dream does and doesn’t come true, with a focus on the author’s shifting understanding of the world’s complexities and the meaning of living well. The initial chapters detail Adams’ early experiments with drugs and delinquency, as well as her tumultuous marriage and struggles with motherhood. Later on, the loosely structured narrative transitions into an account of the author’s midlife commitment to born-again Christianity and its transformative effect on her life. Throughout, Adams confronts her life with candor and painstaking attention to detail. All that detail sometimes feels extraneous—readers will unlikely be interested in the particulars of Adams’s workplace spats or real -estate transactions—but the author’s commitment to honesty is also moving. Readers who have faced similar challenges may find hope in her account of success after struggles. In the book’s final act, Adams describes how she has devoted her professional life to working at anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. While Adams’ uncompromising support of conservative Christian values is likely problematic for those on the opposite side of the politically charged abortion debate, those who share her beliefs may by inspired by her work. Overall, the author’s story reads more like a journal than a memoir; it’s heavy on minutiae and light on substantive analyseis of the events. The writing is also vague and uninventive at times, as when Adams repeatedly describes babies as “bundles of joy” and “smelling of baby powder.” Still, she often succeeds in drawing out the universal challenges within her personal experiences, making her story potentially meaningful to anyone trying to reconcile childhood fantasy with adult realities.
An impressively candid confessional about a woman’s spiritual struggles that lacks in-depth reflection.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-8533-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
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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