TAKE THIS MAN A Memoir

Narrator Bronson Pinchot delivers this memoir with a wistful tone and dramatic timing. When the author was 3, his sociopathic Mexican-American mother reinvented herself as Running Deer Skyhorse, a Native American, and she bestowed the same fake heritage and surname on her son. Adding to the chaos of the author's childhood was a rotating crew of stepdads, his mother's phone-sex career, and a grandma who was an ex-gang-member. As others have shown, unstable, abusive childhoods sometimes make for darkly comic memoirs. Pinchot exploits this incongruity, adding pathos to the early sections of the audiobook and a shell-shocked weariness to the final sad third. The result is an engaging memoir built on an emotional roller coaster of missed opportunities. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2014]