A rambling, tedious narrative that may appeal to fans of James Frey–style, tough-guy confessionals.
A fevered memoir detailing how a surly bohemian, lost to alcoholism, was saved by marathon running.
Shubaly, a musician and raconteur who’s published several bestselling Kindle Singles through Amazon (The Long Run, 2014, etc.), is straightforward about the self-regard he drowned in booze and bad behavior. “For someone who had moved to NYC with the bald intention of getting famous,” he writes, “my anonymity remained so pristinely intact one would think I’d been fighting to preserve it.” The author attributes his decadent lost years to a high-drama childhood, including an estranged father and chaotic family, a sudden cross-country move, and general lower-middle-class angst. This disaster-prone adolescence culminated in admission to Simon’s Rock, the “college for high schoolers,” in time to witness one of the first school shootings of the 1990s. By then, he’d disappeared into punk rock and binge drinking: “Winter came and, with it, darkness….A shot of liquor in the bottom of a chipped glass glowed like it was radioactive: if I take this shot, I will puke tonight. I drank them all.” In this tale of soused desperation, Shubaly dismisses as gullible tools everyone beyond his beleaguered siblings, lovers, and band mates, and he disregards the concept of editorial selectivity: passages focused on mooning over his college girlfriend or his gradual reconciliation with his father go on endlessly—yet he curtly dismisses the citywide trauma of 9/11. The arc of redemption, in which Shubaly forgoes alcohol for the rigors of “ultrarunning,” is similarly repetitious, albeit loaded with the author’s sense of personal triumph. “This was an accomplishment not even I could diminish,” he writes. “There was no denying it. I was one of those top-tier wackjobs.” Though Shubaly produces some humorous and trenchant observations about urban hipster culture, the craft and focus cannot match the grating level of self-absorption.
A rambling, tedious narrative that may appeal to fans of James Frey–style, tough-guy confessionals.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-558-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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