A singularly eloquent account of unusual visitations.
A journalist recounts stories involving the afterlife.
“Someday,” writes Hardesty in his nonfiction debut, “it will be our turn to experience the most mysterious, the most feared and the least understood aspect of human existence”—death itself. Hardesty, a sports journalist for 30 years, writes that he was fond of talking about life, death, and the meaning of it all with his father. When his dad died suddenly of a massive heart attack, Hardesty might have thought those conversations were over. But on the day that he made the funeral arrangements, he says, he began to receive what he calls “visitations” from his father’s ghost; these eventually led to his father giving him a tour of Heaven in his dreams, he says. “While my sleeping body lay peacefully in bed in Stow, Ohio, my soul traveled to Heaven with my dad,” Hardesty writes. “Of this I am sure.” The bulk of the book consists of the author’s descriptions of these and other encounters that he had with the spirits of deceased friends and family members. Thanks to his clear, powerful prose, these stories are uniformly engaging and even moving. He creates surprising emotional moments, as when he realizes how working in the corporate environment of a large tire company took a toll on his father, who started his career as a teacher. Hardesty admits early on that he can’t prove that these visitations happened, and that “naysayers and non-believers will…insist my Christian bent has steered my conscious mind in a biased direction”; he also makes a straw-man argument about scientists “dismissing out of hand the possibility of a Creator simply because they don’t believe in one.” Even so, the author’s colorful evocations of ghostly encounters in his lifetime remain engaging, including vivid moments involving beloved pets.
A singularly eloquent account of unusual visitations.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6483-8
Page Count: 230
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2019
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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