A disorienting but powerful account of a woman’s search for dignity and identity.
A woman, writing under a pseudonym, struggles to recover from two traumatic brain injuries in this memoir.
A successful African-American businesswoman, nicknamed “Scooter,” moved from Silicon Valley with her husband to the Trinity Alps Preserve in California. They grappled with rural politics and hoped to build a house on their land by appearing on ABC’s Extreme Makeover television show. Scooter had earlier survived a brain injury from a car accident in 1976, which altered her personality and left her estranged from her family. Now living in Shasta County with her husband and daughter, she slipped and fell in a Lailomaret store and suffered yet another, more traumatic injury. Robbed of her memory, she also had to cope with a schizophrenic husband who became erratic; children with attention deficit and bipolar disorders; indifferent relatives; attorneys who disputed her “hidden disabilities,” such as memory loss and chronic pain; and doctors who distrusted her symptoms. Scooter remembered past events, but then forgot them; she occasionally couldn’t make new memories. However, she strongly recalled things when her emotions took over, or when racism intruded. At times sardonic and self-aware, at other times resentful, defensive, and determined, Scooter reached out to friends for help as her lawsuit moved forward. After appearing in the studio audience on The Oprah Winfrey Show, she was inspired to write her life story. The author’s narrative is associative rather than chronological, but despite small inconsistencies, a coherent timeline soon emerges, poignantly bookended by the dreams that she once had for a rural retreat. Scooter’s observations are blunt (“I expected one of these specialists to use an X-ray machine that could see my pain”), and sometimes chilling; for example, while watching an interview with two other brain injury victims, she notes that the one with a supportive husband had come to depend on him, whereas the abandoned victim, like her, was more proactive. Alternately detailed and vague, her heartbreaking story circles back to fill in amnesiac lapses with sadness and forgiveness.
A disorienting but powerful account of a woman’s search for dignity and identity.Pub Date: June 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-4830-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
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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