A heartwarming, hopeful memoir brimming with humanitarianism and compassion.
A former foster child pays its forward by cultivating his own unconventional family.
In an effort to “never let a horrific childhood become a tragic adulthood,” foster care advocate and entrepreneur Scheer dedicated his life to ensuring foster children in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area never suffer the insecurity and instability he endured for years. The author describes a horrific childhood full of extreme physical abuse at the hands of an alcoholic father and a mother who’d married seven times and birthed 10 children, dragging her children with her through each bad relationship. The result was emotional scarring lasting well into his 30s, when Scheer met his future partner, Reece, a pragmatic man who would come to be known as “the voice of reason in our home.” Always wanting a family of his own, the author describes the couple’s grueling fostering process, riddled by delays and bureaucratic—and homophobic—red tape. Eventually, they adopted sister and brother Amaya and Makai, and soon after, two more boys, to become a blended family. Interpersonal bonding and finalizing the process in court proved challenging but also a unique opportunity for Scheer and Reece to realize their shared dream of fatherhood. In an unsparingly honest and warmhearted book, the author moves the narrative along with vivid details that are alternately joyful and sorrowful to read. Braided into his journey is a detailed account of his odyssey shuffling through a succession of barbaric foster homes, his emergence as a gay man, and his struggles through a series of toxic relationships. Though Scheer admits to still being haunted by the pain of his past, his loving devotion to his family is evident on every page of this stirring narrative. Furthering his initiative is his project Comfort Cases, which supplies backpacks filled with essential items to foster children in need and a yearly college scholarship fund for kids aging out of foster care into higher educational opportunities.
A heartwarming, hopeful memoir brimming with humanitarianism and compassion.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9663-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Jeter Publishing/Gallery Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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