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 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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