In a memoir that is both funny and furious, tales of private and public adventure from a nationally known radio and TV reporter who is paralyzed from the chest down. Since an automobile accident nearly 20 years ago left Hockenberry a paraplegic, he has won national awards, including an Emmy, for his work as a journalist with National Public Radio and ABC-TV. In his wheelchair, he has reported from Somalia, Jerusalem during the intifada, and Kurdish camps on the border between Turkey and Iran following Desert Storm. He has ducked SCUD missiles in Israel and intrusive questions hurled at him by total strangers in public places. One flight attendant opened a conversation by asking, ``Have you ever thought about killing yourself?'' Her follow-up question: ``Are you able to do it with a woman?'' Hockenberry recounts a life that is full of triumph and humiliation, romance and harsh reality, inventive strategies and daily frustration. When he was studying to be a musician in college just after the accident, he invented a mouth-operated instrument that would let him control the pedals on his piano. But even his persistence hasn't found a resolution to the problem of finding a New York City taxi driver who will help him load his wheelchair in the trunk. Yet this is no simple chronicle of obstacles overcome. Hockenberry looks at himself, his family, and his surroundings with both detachment and empathy, finding kindness from Iranians even as they shouted ``Death to Americans'' and cruelty among his relatives, who buried an uncle in a mental institution for more than 30 years. He also reflects on America's disturbingly complacent view that ``normal'' is white, middle-class, and whole. Challenged and challenging, the author offers a self- portrait of a man in a wheelchair, neither hero nor poster boy, that should help to rattle stereotypes a little further. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6078-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
