Circuitous stories of how advisers and role models have influenced and supported the changes in one man’s messy life.
The actor/comedian and former drug addict explains how mentors have helped him change his life.
Sex, drugs, fame, power—these are just some of the things Brand (Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, 2017, etc.) has been addicted to in his lifetime. In this meandering narrative, the author shares stories of who he was and how he changed via the help of various mentors at different stages in his life. Chip, himself a former drug addict, helped Brand get off drugs by showing him he needed to be honest, willing, and open-minded about life. He taught the author “that it is okay to talk about your feelings, more than okay, mandatory,” including feeling “vulnerable, inadequate, fearful and angry.” Meredith, an acupuncturist, took on the role of mother, nurturing Brand through the difficult details of his divorce. Jimmy identified Brand’s codependent relationships and helped him move beyond them, forcing him to re-evaluate what he took and what he provided in each of them. Each of the author’s mentors has assisted in his transformation from an angry, disillusioned person to the more well-rounded father and spiritual person he is today. “All of us live on a canyon wire between the person we used to be, the person we are ascending and the person we are aspiring to become,” writes the author. “Every day the pugilistic slog goes on for me….I’m back and forth between the kind and ideal me…and the ‘Venom’ version of myself, all fangs and inner eelish sinew, writhing.” After readers meet each of his guides, they will clearly understand how they have helped Brand, but it is debatable whether this knowledge, delivered in a rambling way throughout the text, will be enough to get readers to look for mentors of their own.
Circuitous stories of how advisers and role models have influenced and supported the changes in one man’s messy life.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-22627-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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