An often affecting, if formulaic, story that’s unpretentiously told.
A recounting of a man’s spiritual journey from anger to inner peace.
Debut author George, inspired by the example of his father and three uncles, who all saw combat in World War II, attended the Citadel in 1963—a military academy in South Carolina with a reputation for brutal rites of passage. After his graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was sent to serve as an intelligence officer in Thailand in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. George witnessed not only the grim wages of armed conflict—and even accompanied some pilots on their combat missions—but also the troops’ demoralization, due to politicians’ unprincipled leadership. After his overseas tour concluded, he was stationed in Las Vegas but eventually left in 1972 to join the Los Angeles Police Academy. However, life as an LA cop made him angry and disillusioned, and the emotional distance between himself and his wife grew, leading to divorce in 1977: “How do you remove pain, suffering, avarice, and brutality yet fairly convey the experiences of a policeman to someone who has never experienced the dark side of humanity?” he writes. George later resigned from the force and found himself searching for spiritual succor. He finally discovered solace in Christianity, a religion he once thought was mired in hypocrisy. He later embarked on a corporate career, remarried, and devoted himself to deepening his faith; he ended up starting a new church and became a fire department chaplain. On the whole, the lesson that George communicates in this remembrance isn’t a groundbreaking one; there’s no shortage of autobiographies that recount a journey from repressed trauma to spiritual enlightenment. Still, his story is told with humor and charm, and it’s likely to be an especially poignant tale for readers who’ve also served in the military. Throughout, the author effectively laces his recollections with lighthearted moments and candid self-effacement. At one point, for example, he relates a story about how he pulled a man from a burning apartment, the result of an unattended pot of menudo on the stove. The odor penetrated George’s clothes so deeply that he had no choice but to throw them out, and his superiors gave him a special award: “As far as I know, I’m the only LAPD officer ever to receive the Medal of Menudo.”
An often affecting, if formulaic, story that’s unpretentiously told.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6198-6
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2017
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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