An inspirational story with a happy ending (hopefully permanent).
In her debut memoir, jockey Harris tells how she beat the odds to become the “first African American woman in Chicago racing history to win a race and only the second in U.S. history.
By 1999, when the author was 32, her life had spun out of control. Her son was in foster care, and she couldn't afford medical treatment to control her bipolar disorder. Working at odd jobs and living in a car, she had hit rock bottom. After a relatively privileged childhood in California, she suffered her first manic attack as a teenager and was briefly hospitalized. Her life began a downward spiral with recurring episodes, and she entered a common-law marriage with a would-be musician that ended with him having custody of their two children. A short fling with a Hollywood casting director left her with a third child. After years of drifting—with her father taking custody of her son—she found work on a horse farm in Orlando and began her recovery. In a Hollywood film, the story would end with a fade-out of her triumphant comeback in 2007, when—now a 40-year-old apprentice jockey—she and the beaten-down horse she was riding won a prestigious race. In real life, however, there was no such fairy-tale happy ending. She had overcome many obstacles, but racism and prejudice against a woman trying to enter a traditionally male field still made it difficult for her to find horses to jockey. Offered a horse with an injured shoulder, she accepted, only to be thrown on the ground and seriously injured. By 2009, she was again homeless and in the grips of mental illness as she struggled to remain in the racing game. Fortunately, she moved to Wilmington and found work at the Delaware Park race track, which sponsored a mental-health program. There, she has received effective medication and is participating in group therapy.
An inspirational story with a happy ending (hopefully permanent).Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-171444-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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