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EVERYTHING LOST IS FOUND AGAIN

Name: EVERYTHING LOST IS FOUND AGAIN
Author: Will McGrath
ISBN: 978-1-945814-62-4

FOUR SEASONS IN LESOTHO

by Will McGrath ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2018

A warmly humane memoir.

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An award-winning nonfiction writer’s account of the memorable year he spent living in the South African kingdom of Lesotho.

When McGrath’s cultural anthropologist wife, Ellen, suggested they move to Lesotho, a landlocked nation with the “second highest HIV prevalence rate on the planet,” he had no idea what Lesotho was or where it was located. Nevertheless, he embraced Ellen’s idea, and the pair soon moved to a remote eastern district of the country called Mokhotlong. While his wife researched “how families were adapting to the AIDS crisis,” the author took a job as a high school teacher. He soon befriended many of the district’s interesting inhabitants, including Nthabeleng, a 4-foot “tiny dynamo” of a woman who “sees all, hears all, knows all,” and Limpho, the beloved “hog-butchering librarian” who left Mokhotlong one day to quietly die in a hospital. A keen student of human behavior, McGrath took particular delight in observing the behaviors of the Basotho people. Total strangers held hands, people stared openly at foreigners out of curiosity and interest, and women nursed babies without shame in public. For one cycle of seasons following their arrival, the author and his wife immersed themselves in Basotho culture. In spring, they came as newcomers to a ruggedly beautiful, high-altitude land. By summer, they partook of community celebrations that included a pig-killing feast. That fall, they marveled at dinosaur prints left in ancient rock and witnessed how AIDS was leaving its own mark on the population, all while contemplating their new lives. They left in winter, forever changed by their experiences, with a profound connection to a place that had become their second home. Subtle, witty, and well-observed, McGrath’s narrative is a chronicle of spiritual growth and a memorable love letter to the remote African kingdom that stole his heart.

A warmly humane memoir.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-945814-62-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Dzanc

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)