A gentle, sweet book.
A writer who made it big in her 80s shares the view from behind the scenes.
Baltimore-based essayist Rowe tells the story of her hard-won writing success in her third book, which follows two bestsellers, the first of which her son helped her self-publish. That son, Mike Rowe, is the producer and host of the TV series Dirty Jobs, and the author describes the overlap between her career and his. “I figure that anyone who has inseminated a pig, combed hippopotamus poop from his hair, and bitten the testicles off a baby lamb in front of millions of people is fair game for his mother’s stories. His career has given us a glimpse into a world most people never see. We’ve joined him on episodes of Dirty Jobs and Somebody’s Gotta Do It as well as a half-dozen or so television commercials for Viva Paper Towels, Lee Jeans, Fel-Pro Gaskets, and various cleaning products.” The affection for outré humor must be in their DNA. The author shares a few amusing poems, an anecdote in which a cultured music teacher "toots" and calls it a “D-flat,” and an account of the time a medical procedure caused her husband’s scrotum to resemble an eggplant. Much of Rowe’s humor is of the old-school, Reader's Digest variety, and woven throughout the text is the heartwarming and inspiring story of someone who followed their bliss to success and wide recognition in their ninth decade. (As for the preceding decades, Rowe is unafraid to call out rejecters and critics.) Some of the author’s stories were previously published in the Baltimore Sun and elsewhere, and she has earned a huge audience, both for her published work and on social media, with “her hundreds of thousands of Little Facebook Friends.” She is doubtless ready to welcome new converts with her amazingly unending joy in storytelling.
A gentle, sweet book.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63763-099-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Forefront Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
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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