Best read in short spurts with a stiff drink in hand, this book is an amusing look at depression that could inspire a...
A comedian's humorous take on depression.
Beginning with babyhood and progressing through to a semimature adulthood, stand-up comic Novak whacks depression left and right, giving it a steady beating as she wallows in her own depressive state. "This book is your chance to lean into your depression,” she writes, “to firm up the depressed habits you already possess, while adding a wonderful array of freshly disturbing, unpleasant symptoms and behaviors to your repertoire—a richer variety of grays to your already gray landscape." The author leads by example, digging deeply into her own depressed life and laying bare various bits of personal trivia, problems, and issues that definitely pinpoint her as a "depresso." Novak relates such childhood stories as refusing to produce a urine sample for the doctor or how upset she was when she could no longer hunt for Easter eggs. She discusses how her one-night stands and drug usage helped her get through college, how a healthy relationship was beyond her control, and how she managed to survive a job in a corporate world, where she mastered avoidance techniques that she continues to use. Taken in small doses, Novak's tongue-in-cheek bantering is funny; read too much, however, and you'll feel overloaded, as the single refrain of depression becomes excessive and overworked. Bathroom humor also is prevalent, and the author divulges too many details about the colonics she used to combat her belly fat. For those seeking quick hits of depressive humor, Novak provides ample lists pinpointing a variety of topics: top nine birthday presents for the child depressive-in-training, ways to avoid charming your therapist, and top four tips for crying in a restaurant.
Best read in short spurts with a stiff drink in hand, this book is an amusing look at depression that could inspire a depressed person to rejoin society.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3970-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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