A sudden accident forces a young man to rediscover basic skills, his family, and his religion.
Written in two parts, the first having been published as Ten Seconds in 2013, Goodrich’s memoir recounts how he was coming home to change after a baseball game when a stumble on the stairs resulted in a fractured skull and a 10-day coma. The seemingly simple accident robbed him of basic motor functions and left him with the devastating memory of being surrounded by his family in the hospital, unable to call out to them and feeling as if he was “going to be buried alive.” After major surgery, Goodrich awoke to a world where he could barely recognize his own family and had to endure grueling therapies. He describes them as not just frustrating, but “humiliating,” as he grappled with being a grown man who needed to relearn words like “cat” and “house.” The second, and previously unpublished, portion of the memoir follows Goodrich as he struggled to let go of the “security blanket” of the hospital and return to his parents’ home, overwhelmed by a mixture of joy for their welcome and fear that they remained largely unfamiliar to him. As time went on, Goodrich slowly became more comfortable, eventually returning to work, meeting his wife, having two children, and developing a strong faith in God. In telling his story, Goodrich has a tendency to overemphasize unnecessary information, relating extensive medical explanations and tiny details from the scenes he re-creates. When those scenes of nonrecognition and personal struggle get going, however, they can be candid, heartbreaking, and exceptionally insightful. His lucid descriptions often reveal an unexpected range of emotions that go far beyond the expected despair or determination found in similar stories. Overall, Goodrich manages to make the seemingly outlandish concept of amnesia feel powerfully real and the rather ordinary process of physical therapy feel fraught with complexities—a notable achievement. An inspirational story of recovery from a terrible injury that embraces complexity to great effect.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0094-2
Page Count: 180
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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