Bland prose and few original insights.
A mildly engaging but flawed memoir of addiction and recovery from freelance journalist Moore.
Growing up in Iowa, the author knew he was gay—and that Iowa was boring. There wasn’t much to do but get smashed or high. After graduating from high school, he escaped to college in Pittsburgh, where he met Dino and began an intense love affair. Though they were passionate about one another, both periodically slept with other men; Dino eventually was diagnosed with AIDS. As he cared for his dying lover, Moore, who hadn’t been infected, found relief in activism, getting arrested during early ACT UP protests. He also found more sinister distraction in drugs, especially crystal meth and coke. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles and got sober. He was helped by AA’s storied “higher power,” praying sometimes to Dino, sometimes to the ocean. He took up yoga and spent time in sweat lodges. In the book’s better moments, Moore interjects social critique with a light touch—wondering, for example, why the mainstream media began worrying about meth only once straight teens were hooked. The most gripping scenes find him sober, working at a recovery house and helping other addicts. He compellingly describes the “assortment of castoffs” who came together to beat their addictions; Judy, the tough-skinned lesbian counselor who led the recovery group, steals the show. Other characters, unfortunately, are not as vividly rendered. Moore’s long reminiscences about Dino, for example, would have been enlivened by more dialogue. The author’s non-chronological technique, flashing backward and forward among various memories, proves confusing and irksome. In addition, it feels forced to begin and end the memoir with reflections on the author’s quirky grandmother, who struggled with her own addictions.
Bland prose and few original insights.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-7582-1265-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
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