Too shallow to satisfy as a memoir, but may appeal to believers.
One woman’s testimonial of her journey from willful child to drug lord to servant of God.
With the assistance of veteran co-author Ritz (Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, 2009, etc.), Thompson-Hairston begins near the end, with the author hiding out in a luxurious Miami Beach hotel, fleeing incarceration. Though being on the lam didn’t faze her—she was well-equipped with fake IDs and numerous safe houses—she was extremely worried about the separation from her young son. The guilt drove her to return home to Los Angeles for his sixth-grade graduation, where federal agents awaited her arrival. Following her dramatic arrest outside her son’s school, the author presents herself “before the game.” Unfortunately, most of the real excitement has passed, and the remainder of the book is largely a recitation of facts and name-dropping. After a brief childhood stint at her grandmother’s in Mississippi, Thompson-Hairston returned to California with a vague sense of the importance of family and an aching desire for a boyfriend. She soon fell for Daff, the charming neighborhood pot dealer, and joined him in business, reaping the material benefits. However, while viewing the opulence on display during an episode of Dallas, she realized that she and Daff were only “hood rich.” So the author decided to increase the stakes by dealing in a more lucrative drug, cocaine. It went well. She and Daff built their empire, becoming suppliers to several cities and growing increasingly wealthy, and they shared their good fortune with their community, throwing barbecues and providing employment. The situation presents a unique scenario of drug dealer strictly as businessperson, never indulging, never losing control. But Thompson-Hairston doesn’t adequately explore this facet, and, without a drug-fueled implosion or violent mayhem—there are some fisticuffs and an off-screen, unexplored murder—the book lacks the salacious elements that make criminal memoirs compelling. Instead she went to prison and found God, and she gives Him all the glory.
Too shallow to satisfy as a memoir, but may appeal to believers.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54288-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Avon a/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
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