A welcome second installment for readers who enjoyed Janzen’s first memoir. Others may want to turn elsewhere.
Continuing her search for spiritual relevance in everyday life, Janzen (Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, 2009) recounts the travails and joys encountered while finding love, embracing her new beau’s religion, and surviving breast cancer.
Newly single, the author stepped into the dating world and ended up with an unlikely Mr. Wonderful. A huge, goateed rocker with a permit to carry a concealed weapon, he was a reformed alcoholic with a light Southern accent who uttered pronouncements like, “Well, I’ll be double-dipped!” Janzen was mesmerized, she repeatedly informs the reader, by his giant pectorals and his Pentecostal church. “He loved the pastor, the people, the worship,” she writes. “He loved the teaching, the service programs, the bake sales. It was clear to me that this church was an expression of his core values. If I was to keep dating him, I would need to see what it was all about.” The author also covers a lot of other territory in her memoir—life as an English teacher; her breast cancer; the vast differences between Pentecostals and Mennonites, the religion she grew up with; her family relationships; her hot new romance; and her new relationship with God—and her peppy enthusiasm almost bounds off the page. Some readers, however, may grow tired of the author’s continuously emphatic tone or her constant attempts to appear slightly naughty by divulging topics good girls would not discuss. Also, she makes entirely too much use of the exclamation point—e.g., “If Lazarus was peacefully rotting there in the tomb and if at the sound of Jesus’s voice, he up and trotted out—well, miraculous! He left death and disease behind, yay! Stank hath no hold on him!”
A welcome second installment for readers who enjoyed Janzen’s first memoir. Others may want to turn elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0288-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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