A deeply personal and revealing book about one woman’s attempt to find family, identity, and spiritual peace.
A memoir of survival and New Age spirituality that encompasses three generations of a working-class Polish-American family.
After debut author Stone was born in Wisconsin during 1969’s Summer of Love, she was meant to be given up for adoption, but her mother changed her mind at the last minute. During her childhood, she says, her father was absent and her mother was undependable, so her most stable influences were her down-to-earth Polish immigrant grandparents. Although Zofie and Loosha had strictly raised their own children with an iron hand and a leather switch, according to Stone, they treated her with persistent affection during her turbulent childhood. She says that she saw her parents’ failings—including neglectful parenting and addiction—all too clearly, but she admired their free spirits even as she suffered herself. She lost her virginity at 14, and she later felt the first stirrings of attraction to women, which would define her adult identity. Meanwhile, her mother, she says, stayed with an abusive boyfriend who almost killed her. As the author struggled to end what she saw as a family cycle of self-destruction, she was buoyed by a love of writing and music; she was also drawn to holistic spiritual practices, such as reiki and meditation, which helped her gain self-awareness. Overall, Stone’s memoir is disarmingly chatty in tone; at one point, for instance, she follows up a description of an Arizona landmark with the sentence: “The entire story is quite interesting if you want to google it.” She also occasionally inserts real-time comments: “(A dove is cooing as I write this—how awesome!)” This makes for an intimate reading experience, as do her vivid descriptions of colorful figures in her life, such as Zofie, who once expressed her anger at Loosha by throwing her own false teeth at him. Occasionally, the narrative seems overly detailed, as in a long description of the legal problems that arose after Stone’s mother’s death. However, readers will remain engaged as she attempts to transcend the obstacles in her life.
A deeply personal and revealing book about one woman’s attempt to find family, identity, and spiritual peace.Pub Date: May 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982203-98-6
Page Count: 154
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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