A moving account of how one woman's willpower saved her home and her family.
A woman's journey of survival against many odds.
"Nobody likes a drunk, soon-to-be-divorced, in-debt, swollen-eyed, single mother farmeress," writes Link (Isadore's Secret: Sin, Murder and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town, 2009, etc.) in her down-to-earth, often humorous memoir of her effort to hold onto her farm and her three sons. With "Mr. Wonderful" (her ex) living just across the street, the author chronicles a year's worth of struggles as sole breadwinner, mother and farmer. In a partially refurbished old farmhouse, Link battled the monthly cycle of bills and the impossible task of feeding three teenage boys on her vegetable garden, one pig and a free year's supply of day-old bread, courtesy of the giant-zucchini contest she won. With the death of her beloved horse, her dreams of one kind of life were replaced with another vision and a loneliness that she filled with work and the need to survive. Whether gardening, stealing firewood or shoveling snow, the foursome eked their way through the lack of heat, food and money, juxtaposing days of intense labor with fun-filled moments like cooking marshmallows indoors in the fireplace or finding the perfect Christmas tree. As winter turned to spring and the threat of losing everything hung over her head, Link was forced to make difficult decisions. But tenacity and perseverance prove life can be good, filled with simple joys such as watching her sons grow into hardworking individuals, eating food straight from the ground and collecting eggs from her own hens. And if romance appears at odd moments, so much the better.
A moving account of how one woman's willpower saved her home and her family.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-59691-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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