An inspiring chronicle of a search for healing.
An emotionally wounded woman chooses a wild life.
In September 2016, Madia and her boyfriend—and soon, husband—decided to give up their Salt Lake City apartment and live in an old, rusted van, unheated, uninsulated, freezing in winter and suffocatingly hot in summer, which they affectionately named Bertha. They eventually added “a homemade shower, a roof box, bike rack, and solar panels,” making it look “like something out of a Mad Max movie.” Along with two energetic dogs, they roamed the west in a vehicle that repeatedly, and frustratingly, broke down in the middle of nowhere. In her candid debut memoir, Madia reveals her “curiously deep-seated need to be against,” which led her to embrace a decidedly unconventional life. Born and raised in a middle-class neighborhood situated between a wealthy Connecticut suburb and blighted Bridgeport, she grew up “at the center of shame and guilt and money and status.” She was rebelling, though, against more than consumerism and conformity. By the time she was in high school, her father had gone to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse. After he cheated on her mother, her parents divorced, and she didn’t hear from him for years. In college, she became so depressed she was suicidal. “Perhaps it was the loss of so much that made me want so little,” she reflects. “The less I had, the less I’d have to inevitably part with.” Settling into a house, having a family, even holding a stable job felt constricting: “Fear and curiosity. Those, to me, became the essentials of being alive.” Madia describes in visceral detail the near disasters that she experienced, the horrific accident that nearly killed one of the dogs, and her evolution into an Instagram personality that gave her an audience eager for stories of her adventures. In social media, she finally found the validation and appreciation she longed for: “I loved being someone other women looked up to.”
An inspiring chronicle of a search for healing.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-04798-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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