Ultimately, Benson moans his way through the entire experience, as though he couldn’t have foreseen the punishment he would...
The story of a naïve 20-something’s monthlong 2,000-mile bike trek, a journey designed to provide some direction to his life.
First-time memoirist and Portland, Oregon-based bike enthusiast Benson tells the all-too-familiar life story of the archetypal disaffected young white male just out of college putting himself through some masochistic Pilgrim’s Progress ordeal in order to make sense of his life. In the beginning, we find Benson in the Guatemalan jungle, where he soon grew tired of the backpacker’s life and decided he needed more than just rudderless experiences abroad to have a chance at spiritual fulfillment. Consequently, he and his girlfriend, Rachel, traveled back to the United States to embark on a grueling bike journey from their native Wisconsin all the way to western Oregon. To make the trip even more difficult, they imposed a strict one-month deadline for the adventure. However, the best American road narratives are borne out of leisurely pacing, often allowing for more randomness and serendipity to take place along the road. Benson and Rachel were so busy blazing toward their destination that they missed countless opportunities to connect with their surroundings or, more importantly, with each other. What we get instead is a lot of bellyaching about gnarly headwinds, sore legs, flat tires and sweaty armpits—and not much real drama otherwise. Furthermore, the author misses nearly every chance to find humor in their situation, instead dropping the F-bomb in every other sentence like some rogue Vice magazine correspondent (“Fuck the stupid Rockies. I didn’t need them”).
Ultimately, Benson moans his way through the entire experience, as though he couldn’t have foreseen the punishment he would absorb on this colossal but spiritually empty cycling journey.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218064-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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