Inspired, white-knuckled fun from start to finish.
A charmingly candid memoir of the year a young journalist spent conquering her deepest fears.
In 2008, Hancock was on a beach in Aruba when she learned that her nearly six-figure blogging job had become a victim of the Great Recession. Shocked and confused, the newly unemployed pop-culture journalist promptly downed two shots of Jack Daniels and “adopted a large family of piña coladas.” Unable to find a job upon her return to New York, she had to face the unpleasant fact that “to tell people that you do nothing is like saying ‘I am nothing.’ ” She attempted to devise a “one-year plan,” only to find herself paralyzed into inaction by increasing anxiety and self-doubt. Then one day, and quite by chance, she came across a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt scrawled across a café menu board: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” These simple words changed Hancock’s life. Not only did she decide to take the advice literally and apply it to each of the 365 days that followed her upcoming 29th birthday; she also set herself the task of reading all of the former first lady’s major writings. If Roosevelt, who began life as a painfully shy child, could grow into a self-confident woman remembered for her extraordinary courage, then Hancock could easily move beyond her own fears, no matter how primal or idiosyncratic. During the next 12 months, the author swam with sharks, jumped out of airplanes, embalmed dead bodies, confronted ex-boyfriends, kicked a 10-year sleeping-pill habit and climbed to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Pushing her limits, Hancock reconnected with the ballsy, irreverent person she had once been. More importantly, her exercise in overcoming fear allowed her to return to living her life with a renewed sense of purpose and proportion.
Inspired, white-knuckled fun from start to finish.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-187503-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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