Jenkins’ many Instagram followers won’t be disappointed.
Or, evangelism and the art of bicycle maintenance on a long journey of self-discovery.
Instagram personality Jenkins works a familiar trope: a challenging season of travel as a means of finding out what makes him tick and working out the big questions. Granted, his travel was far more challenging than most, as he decided to leave a job and a life that afforded him plenty of satisfactions in order to ride a bicycle from Oregon to the tip of South America. “It wasn’t the job that chased me away,” he writes of hitting the 30-year-old mark, “it was mortality.” He adds, meaningfully, that he had plenty of background; what remained was to acquire experience, or “background and tools,” with which to live his life henceforth. The trip took 16 months and brought him a built-in audience for this memoir as he posted photographs and observations to social media. In the company of an adventurous friend, Jenkins found plenty of occasions for that self-discovery, sifting through the wreckage of family crises, wrestling with sexual identity, and grappling with questions of faith and religious belief. “I think that you’re scared, and that’s bullshit,” said his friend after a critical moment that managed to touch on most of these points. “I just want you to be free.” Jenkins gets there—to that freedom, that is, and also to Patagonia. His account runs a little long, some of it a mere slideshow of impressions ("Mexico City is a beast”; “It was beautiful, the air was clean, the light angled just right”). Other moments are more successful, though. The author is especially good at eliciting wisdom, even if sometimes of a loopy kind, from the people he encountered—his traveling companion in particular but also people like a young Argentinian woman who confided that she wants to do a road trip through the U.S.: “I want to see the empire before it falls."
Jenkins’ many Instagram followers won’t be disappointed.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6138-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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