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CATCH ME BEFORE I FALL

Name: CATCH ME BEFORE I FALL
Author: Rosie Childs
ISBN: 1-85227-360-7

by Rosie Childs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2006

Grueling, but riveting.

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A debut memoir traces the long-lasting consequences of childhood trauma.

Childs’s startling and evocative autobiography begins thus: “I am fifty-two years old and have changed my name seven times so far.” What follows is the story of those name changes, and of the life changes that prompted them. Childs was born in Liverpool, the mixed-race result of her white mother’s extramarital affair. Her mother kept a slovenly house and neglected her children. Occasionally, Childs was placed in temporary foster care, but she was always returned to her mother’s squalid surroundings until social services finally moved her to the Park Hall Children’s Home, which was run by Irish nuns. Though the nuns were emotionally distant, and Childs found their Catholic morality foreign and arbitrary, she settled into a routine, and began, if not to flourish, at least to function. Just as she had found her niche, she was shuttled into a horrific situation with a manipulative foster mother. All in all, her childhood was “a series of starvations.” Eventually, Childs enrolled in a two-year college nursing course. On the surface, things were looking up: No one knew her background, and her classmates were friendly and nice. But Childs’s life caught up with her. She began cutting herself (treating her razor blade with sacred reverence, wrapping it “in white tissue paper like a delicate, fragile piece of china”) and binging and purging. A breakdown, a suicide attempt and a stay in a psychiatric hospital followed. By the end of this searing account, Childs’s recovery seems simultaneously remarkable and unfinished. Her blunt, straightforward prose is eerily effective, and there are moments of real literary sophistication; her recollection of a childhood attempt to steal apples from a tree reads like a subtle commentary on the famous scene in which Augustine steals from a pear tree.

Grueling, but riveting.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006

ISBN: 1-85227-360-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)