by Toni Braxton ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2014
Overly sentimental, but Braxton fans will applaud the star’s candor and perseverance.
Six-time Grammy Award winner Braxton speaks out regarding her turbulent personal and professional lives.
From the time Braxton was a little girl growing up in rural Maryland, she wanted to be a star. By the mid-1990s, she had achieved that goal, and her 1996 single, “Un-break My Heart,” from her second album, “Secrets,” became a chart-topping, certified-platinum success. Yet guilt, financial and personal troubles, and ongoing family health issues have pockmarked the author’s projected glamorous life. In 1988, 21-year-old Braxton and her four sisters landed their first recording contract. “No one could’ve predicated the painful episode that would follow: Five bright-eyed Braxton sisters would soon be narrowed down to one.” For many years, Braxton suffered severe guilt about accepting a record deal that excluded her sisters, and the decision infuriated her mother, which added to Braxton’s sense of dismay. The author’s success was also marred by two bankruptcies, a divorce and her son’s autism diagnosis. The author faced her own health crisis during her Las Vegas show when she received a diagnosis of lupus. “My diagnosis that day marked the beginning of my road to recovery,” she writes, “but it was also the end of my Vegas run.” The author eventually disclosed her condition on the family reality TV show Braxton Family Values, which began in 2011 and features her mother and sisters. Braxton seems intent on establishing a secure pathway through life’s inherent messiness. “I’m starting to realize that we’re not supposed to keep everything lined up and in perfect order—even with our best efforts, we can’t accomplish that anyway,” she writes. “Instead, we’re meant to find lessons in both the chaos and the cleanup.”
Overly sentimental, but Braxton fans will applaud the star’s candor and perseverance.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229328-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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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...
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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