A brutally honest emotional odyssey.
A memoir about a middle-aged journalist who decided that running in his father's footsteps was his best shot at resurrection.
Several years ago, with his writing career tanking and a failed marriage, Powell (This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez, 2012, etc.) happened to read a magazine article trumpeting the intoxicating running scene in Boulder, Colo. Freshly inspired, he packed up his Miami apartment, grabbed his loyal dog and hit the road intent on reinventing himself. The author recounts his personal story of how he spent a rigorous year of his life sleeping in a converted chicken coop and running among the bracing Flatirons in a bid to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon. Boston has always loomed large in Powell's self-loathing psyche since his father set the standard decades earlier when he successfully ran the road race as a remarkable middle-aged novice. The emotionally bereft son's complex relationship with his father runs throughout this sinewy narrative. "He never talked about work at the dinner table when I was a kid,” writes the author. “What he did with his time, on those business trips or in that office of his, was his world alone." During the course of his less-than-magical year of kinetic reinvention, Powell also began to consider Frank Shorter, former Olympian and curious Boulder running icon, as something close to an anti-father, the perfect obsessive and self-destructive example of how not to behave. No matter how far he ran, however, Powell couldn’t seem to put much distance between himself and the woman he originally walked out on or the subsequent women who, in turn, walked out on him. Pounding the pavement didn’t yield any easy answers, and the author's redemption is never a foregone conclusion. In fact, by the end of Powell's relentlessly critical self-analysis, it's clear there's still a lot more road left to be run.
A brutally honest emotional odyssey.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26366-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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