Though the dialogue has its wooden moments, this is, on the whole, an accessible, inspiring journey.
How Martin and her husband sold their house and became full-time international wayfarers.
The travel bug can bite at any moment, and it sank its teeth into the author and her husband, Tim, when they were in their mid-60s. Since then, they have recorded their travels on the author’s blog, homefreeadventures.com, always following their motto, “postpone nothing.” To jettison home and a lifetime of stuff can be a liberating and rejuvenating experience, and the Martins took to the road with an envious moxie and openness. Since they were not operating with a fat bank account to provide an easy cushion—they calculated their budget by including their Social Security checks—they were always on the prowl for bargains mixed with good locations and a modicum of cleanliness. Nearly every page has some crack piece of travel wisdom: the power of civility, patience and flexibility; the difference between knowing the facts about a place and knowing “those facts in a way that only being on the ground and experiencing them offers a person.” Martin is a plainspoken chronicler, eschewing pyrotechnics in her descriptive writing, and though obviously polite and cultured, she is also often frank and unvarnished in her estimation of things and people. She was not too jaded to pay attention to the serendipities of travel—a full moon rising over the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, for instance—nor too formal not to speak her mind: Argentinians are moody, temperamental and confused. The Martins were happy making a lonely trip to the Oracle of Apollo and catching the wind off the Cornwall coast, but they also liked to mix it up: “Seeing your first bar fight after age sixty-five is not an insignificant event.”
Though the dialogue has its wooden moments, this is, on the whole, an accessible, inspiring journey.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-9153-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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