An eye-opening journey.
The struggle for a normal life through the eyes of a sufferer of bipolar disorder.
Unless one’s life has been touched by bipolar disorder, it’s hard to imagine the effects of the manic-depressive illness. But in this memoir, Walton takes readers deep inside the disease. From the opening page, she captures the internal debate raging during an episode: Is this real? Can anyone be trusted? Psychotic episodes followed by depression is her “usual” pattern, a pattern that consumes chunks of her life each time. In an almost detached and analytical voice, Walton deftly describes the thoughts and feelings during what she calls the “insane” time, the motionlessness of the resulting depression and the efforts to have a normal life—complete with a job, marriage, family and women’s groups—in between. Beginning with her first episode, the memoir then explores the author’s backstory, then ahead to treatment, then back into the past and forward again; much along the lines of a self-discovery process. Despite the shifting chronology, the work never loses its insight into bipolar disorder or the connection between author and reader, as she leads the exploration through the ins and outs of her particular world. At first resistant to medication, Walton ultimately builds a team to help her, including a cocktail of medicines to right her damaging chemical imbalances and manage her symptoms, and the unending support of her husband, daughter, therapist, family and friends. Forever lurking, underlining every aspect of her existence, though, is the question of: “How much longer until the next breakdown?” Until it happens, Walton is living her life and meeting it head on, keenly aware of just how precious every day really is.
An eye-opening journey.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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